Girl, You Ain't Nothin' but a Raw Ramp
by ninety6tears
Summary: If the two of them had been friends, they might have been able to make into a joke whatever intricate radical feminist conspiracy these assholes were cooking up in their imaginations to explain why they were suddenly having to worry about the female competition; but they weren't. (Rule 63 AU)
1. Chapter 1

**A/N:** This will have a few characterizations/references drawing from research on the real people rather than anything that was shown in the film. Maybe I say this to clarify that not all details are necessarily conjectured as what the female version of Hunt or Lauda would have been like, but may just be biographical bits I was drawn to including for whatever reason. Lauda's relationship with Regazzoni is somewhat more inspired by their real-life relationship, if it will be pretty complicated here. Nonetheless I can only warn you to expect amateur inaccuracies and deviations from history, though some of them—most significantly the standings in the '75 season—are intentional for the purpose of the story, though obviously, so is the two of them being turned into women.

::

::

The thunderstruck silence was no surprise, as she sat with the smell of mahogany and the dust of the parlor churning like a distilled meadow in the wide space between her and her mother, but it did last much longer than Niki felt like sitting through.

"Mama, you never once asked me about why I was going on a different diet and going out cycling every day and all that. Why did you never ask what I was doing?"

"I thought..." She had her hand pressed to her sternum, swallowing.

"Nevermind," Niki said, confirming, "you thought maybe I'd gotten a boyfriend."

" _Niki_ ," her mother interrupted with a rising boil of conviction now that she was beginning to recover from the disbelief. "Your father isn't going to hear about you trying to do this for a living. And even if he would, my God, you're going to end up in hospital, or—"

"It's not impossible," she said, giving a shrug. "And I'm sorry about that. But it's what I want to do."

"You _can't_. The answer is no."

"I don't need permission, that's what you don't understand. I'm telling you that I already have plans to get my own apartment. I've been saving money for years; I have about 70 percent of a good car put together at Fabian's garage, I just have to start winning races and I'll be—"

"Niki, I can't let you do this. This is just...some idea you're pursuing to get attention, or make yourself feel—"

"No," Niki said, so sternly that her mother slowly closed her mouth, staring back at her daughter in angry speechlessness. She shook her head and let out a long sigh, finally accusing, "This is always what you've done, you've always pitied me, you've always worried about me. You're afraid that if I make Father turn his back on me, then his father won't let me help him with the company, and you're afraid because I'm not pretty and I'm not going to end up living some socialite life of a rich businessman's wife, that makes you worry about me. I know that."

"Oh, please don't think that—"

She interrupted, continuing with a finger pointed decidedly down on her armrest. "But you don't have to worry anymore, because I can do _this_ instead. I'm going to be the best. You'll see. When I start winning, you'll be proud of me...Maybe even Father too, but he won't deserve it." She added that last with a slight baring of bitterness before mentally waving that off for another day, and was standing to make her exit.

The desperation was kicking in like a grating screech in the air, and Niki looked away to hear Mama say, "Niki, you're going to get hurt. Please, you're going to get _killed_..."

She said, "I will try very hard to keep that from happening."

That wry if genuine response fell into more weight as she did look at her mother then, and saw the thing she couldn't stay for, the outright pleading that would happen when it was realized all at once that _this_ was the reason she would have to worry about her daughter now, not about her leaving home or what any man could do to her but what she was planning to regularly do to herself. For that second when she met the eyes that almost mirrored the alert grey-blue of her own, she saw the fearful certainty so thickly felt that it was like an omen, a feeling that Mama was right, that Niki was signing up for her death and that of course, this was ludicrous.

And Niki couldn't see it or hear it because she did love her mother, after all; she'd given way to the half-hearted attempts at ballet and piano and getting versed in the vapid cocktail party topics over the years, but this time there could be no yielding. She could not let any emotion for her mother make her waste herself anymore. So she said, "I'm sorry, but I've made up my mind," and was out of the parlor room at a brisk walk, having so scathingly snatched herself away now that there was no response.

::

Tony Dron, during some years down the line, would have a good laugh over the fact that he was almost too late to the circuit to even be able to compete that day. He'd been left under his granddad's vigilant watch for the duration of Ma and Dad's anniversary trip to France, and the old man had simply decided that none of this karting garbage was going to happen this weekend; it was the same old story with at least one person in the family of every sod who'd decided one overturning time or another that he was to become a race car driver, or so he'd been told by every other young sportsman.

Over the course of breakfast Tony had struggled to explain, in turn, that kart racing was for total amateurs, that formula racing on the other hand wasn't something he could just back out of with less than a week's notice, and that he was eighteen years old now, thank you. When it became clear he had no ride, sneaking off to get a cab proved to be an accomplishment on par with espionage. He'd arrived at Oulton Park fully expecting to be far too late, but barely managed to slide into his car a minute before the starting time, earning a bemused expression from one of the gents on the inspection team.

Because of this whole rut, he was unable to really put faces with cars on that particular race. After what started out as a strong run, when he gauged too far back and forth around the Cascade corner, the Ford that was nipping behind his third position and then was rushed to overtake him had no name attached in his mind, when the driver tried to fling his car out of risk and immediately wrung it with an ugly crack through an advertisement board, and was down the green.

A quick knot of dread pulling up in his throat, Tony pulled over and got out. He ran in gasps after the telltale imprints of a cartwheeling wreck running down into the edge of the lake. His nerve seized him up when he saw the rollover bar ripped off into the grass, but he ran down the path of chewed-off metal right into the water, bracing with a cringe against whatever ugly carnage might surface.

"Ah, shit," he groaned, ready to run into the water, though at this point he knew it was probably the worst. The car had been shoved deep, almost completely submerged in the middle of the lake. His astonishment stalled him.

The very moment he came back to his senses and flinched forward to step into the water, a splash was spat up and someone ripped above the surface: the driver was shoulder-deep and had yellow hair long enough that the tips floated in the rippling ebbs, and coughed once, turning a head with wide eyes back towards the track.

Tony didn't know if he was more surprised by the fact that the driver was alive, or that the face was a woman's.

They stared at each other. Finally after some time he hollered, "Are you alright?" just when she began, slowly, to step forward and make some way out of the water. Those eyes were shocked, unfocused, but she nodded in response. He waded in till he was soaked past his knees, offering her his arm, which she grabbed with vague attention. "What's your name? I didn't see earlier."

"Hunt," she said, pinching some hair out of her eyes with a look of stiff distaste that somehow softened her tension. "Jaime Hunt."

He looked behind their shoulders back into the lake. "I'm sure the medics will be out...God. Did you get flung right out? What happened to your belts?"

"No seatbelt. The engine put me in the bloody red, and I had to cut corners to save the other few pounds. Funny thing, I guess. If I'd been wearing one, I think I would have drowned just now. I think that's a certainty." And then she opened her mouth and laughed, a startling laugh that struck the air a little wrong next to her alert, darting eyes. She said, "Hey, listen. Did you ever hear the one about Saint Nicholas walking into a sex shop?"

It seemed clear she'd gotten some sense knocked out of her, if she'd had any to begin with. Tony chuckled uneasily, continuing to walk her up to the track. "Uh, Miss Hunt. What's a nice girl like you doing driving a race car? You sure are lucky you didn't get yourself killed already."

"Look, man, don't interrupt. I'm trying to tell you a joke."

.

Jaime didn't have anything to say about the appearance of the bob-haired and bucktoothed girl she'd seen walking around in driver's overalls until Nathan, a med student she'd picked up for good luck the night she'd landed in London, asked, "Did you see there's another woman racing?" This was in a mumble as he kissed her out of her clothes for a quick shag in a friend's trailer just less than half an hour before Jaime was supposed to be on the starting position.

"Yeah. So?"

"So who is she?"

"How should I know?"

She did end up asking Bubbles about it, though.

"That's Niki Lauda. Some princess from a family that owns a paper company in Austria...You worried about her?"

Jaime scoffed, then winked. "I'll pray she doesn't give me a paper cut."

Once she was strapping in, there was a motion that caught her eye from the edge of her vision just as she tossed her hair back to make it behave underneath her helmet. Lauda was bowing to check something on or under one of her tires, and when her glance came up to meet Jaime's, it flickered back down with indifference. The lack of acknowledgment having settled comfortably, Jaime put her helmet on, smirking lightly as the charge forward was already buzzing through her, narrowing her vision.

.

"Hey!...Hey, asshole!"

Jaime's gaggle of fellow celebrators rang up in laughter after a stunned pause at the sound and sight of Niki making a beeline for Jaime, who stepped forward to make an ironic curtsy, bowing low and coming up saying, "Your English could use a primer. Most people would just say 'bitch' to the ladies, though I can't imagine you've never heard the word."

"'Bitch' might be a compliment for you," Lauda replied in a light snap, her accent frizzing out the severity of it somehow. "I'm calling you an asshole. What the fuck were you doing out there?"

"Now, _girls_ ," one of the bystanders started tutting, inducing another wave of sniggering around them which they both ignored.

"I'd call that winning," Jaime Hunt said, popping open her lighter and unzipping her overalls a few inches to let some air in. "Don't come crying to me like a little girl cause you're not used to competing against professionals."

"Oh, professional. That's what you call that." Lauda nodded, her prominent teeth showing in a snarl. "Fuck you, alright?"

As she was walking off in a steady storm, Jaime's friend Dina hissed through her laughter, "Is she serious?"

"You know, it's almost sad," Jaime said. "I think she is completely serious."

And that was that; while no one said anything out loud about it, there was the amused consensus that in all likelihood none of them would ever see Niki Lauda again, not in the big time anyway. After all, how many women did you ever come across who could really drive?

::

The colors of the sunrise scorched behind the profile of Niki's stooped shoulders when she paused next to the track to make a few notes in a leather-bound notebook, her just shy of masculine figure catching curious stares from some other early risers shaking hands in the bleachers.

There were several Formula Two drivers getting in practice runs that day, and a few others floating around in social mumbles. Clay Regazonni caught up to her outside the motel where a lot of them would be staying. Half-amicably, they complained about every little problem she'd found with the track, until Clay clearly took an interest in a blonde who'd just come into the bar alone and in a moment she said, "You might as well go on if you're just going to be thinking about her for the rest of this conversation."

His eyes darted, then settled down. "Alright. I can see no man could ever get anything past you." Her reaction to this barely committed to being a shrug, and he asked in a curious lilt, "Ah, why don't you smile every once in a while? Is it because of your teeth?"

"Are you more comfortable when women around you are pretending to be ecstatic?" she demanded. By her standards this was a playful riposte; she usually ignored the question when she got it.

"What _would_ make you happy?" he asked in a thoughtful taunt.

She turned a page in the magazine he'd leant her. "Maybe a prospect with Enzo Ferrari, but I'm not promising anything."

He sighed, laughing at her forwardness. "I told you I would try, but I can't make any promises either."

"Thank you. Now go," she said, before this could get further into the topic that would make him detect too much at play here that would feel like cold politics to his freewheeling sort of favorability towards her, which to her added up to nothing more than the simple fact that she badly needed one of the only people she could tell was actually taking her seriously as a driver to convince the next person it was with good reason.

It was a shame, she thought with some inner flicker of sarcasm, that she wasn't more like that Jaime Hunt: able to get a sponsorship out of someone's mere amusement with the idea of a fit party girl who got behind the wheel of a formula car almost as often as she had a person spread between her legs and far more often than she did anything remotely ladylike; the general picture wasn't unlike Niki but Niki didn't have the looks, and if the compact-bodied Austrian girl wore more skirts and knew which fork to use first at a restaurant, people would rather pay attention to the loud novelty of Jaime with her unusual pets and her excess of skin always provoking store owners into tapping the "No Shirt No Shoes No Service" sign.

Niki supposed she couldn't begrudge Hunt for taking the leg-up where she could get it, but Hesketh was only becoming more of a joke now that the woman was becoming almost as infamous for her inability to keep cars in one piece as she was for incidentally being a girl, so the inevitability that someone backing the races was going to get tired of her antics and pull the plug made Niki perfectly comfortable with how things were. Not that she felt threatened in any way by Jaime's barely noticeable improvements within the past year.

It was just that she didn't particularly like the inevitable comparisons between them, though she could remind herself with a different kind of satisfaction that Hunt liked that even less. At the last race they'd both competed in, a curious photographer took their icy conversation as friendly from a distance and yelled politely if they could pose together for a quick photo, please. Both women had extended a gesture of flicking him off in unison, and continued launching their insults at closer range than usual.

Often, when Jaime saw Niki around, she winked at her or made some other mockingly exaggerated show of friendliness. It was becoming increasingly ritualistic, to the point that when their paths actually didn't cross at the circuits Niki caught herself looking along the pits to check whether Hunt was somewhere after all. And something about the track didn't kiss her wheels as fiercely, something about the speed didn't slide by with the same precise hiss to her adrenaline, when Jaime wasn't there to beat. So clearly Niki didn't feel she was a threat. Wouldn't be for much longer, either way.

At the next race Lauda came in first but Jaime made quite a show of celebrating her second place anyway; it seemed in fact that when she didn't celebrate winning she always considered her living through the race to be a perfectly good reason for a party. Jaime wasn't staying at the hotel that was popular with the drivers but she sparked into the bar, still in her overalls for some reason though she'd of course bothered at some point to remove her boots. Shortly after that the party revved up with a few rounds of liquor and somebody's copy of _Aladdin Sane_.

When Niki was taking her leave of the noise she happened to glance back into the window at the sight of Hunt standing up on one of the tables, beginning to put on a show of teasingly stripping out of her suit to unveil her bra underneath to a small throng of pleased drunks. Niki did a kind of lazy scoffing, wanting to go in there and tell her she should save the sultry production for when it wasn't the only commodity she could claim to have. But even if she would have bothered, she could smell what the comeback would be, something to do with the fact that the men didn't need her to win to want to watch, and Niki hardly needed that sort of shallow smugness from somebody so second-rate.

.

It was no surprise that the media had started taking an exceptional interest in both of them fairly early on, even if it was only sometimes in a complimentary way. Jaime had gotten asked by one of the Formula journalists what her husband (some musician named Gary Green, Niki had heard) had thought of her doing nude photos for _Playboy_ recently. Without missing a beat Jaime's response had been, "I don't know, I'll have to ask him some time."

Niki couldn't guess whether she was actually faithful to Gary, but it was hard to miss much of the rumor mill's rapt attention upon Jaime's infamous sex life, especially after they'd stayed in one too many of the same hotels. There was something so elemental about the woman's sexuality, an alluring ease in the way her every move could suggest it, that somewhat went beyond any possible objectification if you were smart enough to really recognize that she was very much in charge of her effect on people. Life was underneath other people's skin and she had to dig it out to make the most of her own. Men would go up to her room, sometimes two at a time, maybe even three, expecting they'd get a good story to tell, but later a lot of them would come back blushing and vaguely mesmerized and finding themselves unable or unwilling to divulge much of the details whenever the topic arose. It was nothing to romanticize, Niki figured; they'd probably just been screwed up on too many drugs to have fully absorbed the experience.

There were women too, unless you could buy that they sometimes went up there just to watch. But nobody would call Jaime a "dyke"; with her long-limbed body of a goddess and earnestly seductive mouth, she would not suit the package they associated with that word. Better to stomp that label onto someone more ugly, more bucktoothed and bitchy.

It wasn't true that Niki never had boyfriends, but it could be said that she repeatedly seemed to find them to be not worth much of any compromise. Her first was Ulrich when she was seventeen, who had taught her a lot she needed to know about cars but had found some reason to break up with her soon after realizing she was learning too fast for him to keep up. "I feel like we have nothing to talk about anymore," he'd said.

There was Oliver, with whom she'd had an at least abstractly serious relationship during the F3 days, but later during the humiliation that was her '72 season she fell into such a depression that he more or less balked, trying to pin the failures of their intimacy on how much she depended on him because she needed a place to live; outraged at the suggestion, particularly because he just might have been right, she'd arrogantly made her exit without really making any time to process whatever heartbreak may have happened, and promptly dove into the crisis that made her have to take out a second loan with absolutely no room to even contemplate the possibility of more failure.

And then she'd made a bit of a name as a driver and, while they say there's no such thing as bad publicity, the complications with the gents had only been replaced by different ones. Some of them she felt sure were genuine fans, but it was hard to discern them from the ones who just wanted a particularly odd notch on their bedpost; it was better to avoid men who followed racing at all.

But there was one night during the off-season when she went home with a drama student named Tobias who was more than halfway handsome and didn't give any hint he even knew what she was relatively famous for. It wasn't impossible that he actually didn't, but when she was in his bathroom later she absently perused the pile of magazines, going wry at the naughty ones she found sandwiched under the issues of _Time_ and _Creem_. When she spotted the cover she'd seen all too many times in the lean of fans bleeding into the pits for autographs, her mood dropped into something like an accusing sigh.

Tobias knocked on the bathroom door. "Are you okay in there?"

"I'm sorry," she said abruptly, and started to tightly roll up the magazine to shove it into the side of her bag. "I'm actually not feeling well."

The lie was indifferently concerted, and his disappointment leaked noticeably into his offer to give her a lift home.

"No, I'll get a cab." She opened the door, moving by him quickly. "Thank you."

She went through the photos and the interview while eating a sandwich at an all-night cafe, her interest creasing into the predicted amount of disgruntlement minute by minute. On one page they'd posed her in profile on the hood of a Mercedes, wearing an open letterman jacket, her pubic hair barely brushing up from the coy pose of her legs and one shapely breast sighing pointedly out between the buttons. Her face was poised up, lips open as if wanton for the sunlight that graced so many bends of gold in her feathered hair. She could have gone far in modeling. Even farther in penning cheap erotica, considering all the entendres she was capable of making about the rumble of the engine and what types of pets she liked best.

When Niki asked the waitress to bring her the bill, she added, "Also, could you throw this away for me?"

"Sure," the server said, then hesitated, blushing, when she looked at the magazine she was holding.

Gulping a last drink of coffee, Niki looked her up and down, demanding, "What's the problem?"

Where Jaime was an open book, Niki kept as tightly sealed a profile as possible. Even having come up with their own conclusions, the journalists always had the most predictable lack of tact.

"I think you mean to ask, am I frigid?" she said to one of these entitled inquiries on one occasion. "I've been asked these questions in every possible way, as if I'm going to actually think it's your business if you word it a bit differently. You all seem very uncomfortable with the idea that a woman could possibly be more interested in cars than the things you all buy them to compensate for."

Later somebody from a small magazine, in a somewhat more candid setting, asked, "The thing is, the stereotype is that race car drivers sleep around like rock stars. Can you at least understand our curiosity about whether the environment is any different for you, being a woman?"

She decided to throw this guy a bone. "It gives me an advantage that I don't get easily distracted, and that has not so much to do with being a woman. I like sex just as much as the next person." After a second, she added with emphasis, "Unless the next person is Jaime Hunt."

It just seemed like she was constantly putting up with all this bullshit from any man who was showing her the slightest hint of interest, for all that she insisted, when asked, that she had nothing to prove. In Italy she picked up a hitchhiker who was charming enough, laughing and immediately nicknaming her "Detective" for the way she'd deduced he was too far out of town to not have given somebody else a reason for kicking him out of their car. He explained about a friend of his he had pissed off pretty badly for saying something admittedly in bad taste about the guy's unfaithful girlfriend. Once they'd gotten into what they did for a living, though, she lost her patience.

"You really race for Ferrari?" he demanded.

"That's what I said, isn't it?"

"How come I've never heard of you? I know McClaren's got that one beauty...but I don't recognize you."

"You will now."

"How do I know you're not joking with me? Look at the way you're driving this thing, for starters. All this open road and you're crawling along..."

"What is the incentive to go fast? Just to prove it to you, because you don't believe me? Why do I care about that?"

Scoffing at the dropped pleasantries, he made an attempt at a peaceable gesture. "I don't mean to disrespect you, I just think, why not show it off? Especially since you're a woman, that's really something special if you can do something like that...Come on, I just want to have some fun."

"You're right, it is special. But you? A man who's used to getting what he wants?" She demanded, "What's so special about that?"

Without turning to look she could feel his chagrined decision that she wasn't nearly worth the trouble, and they said very little to each other for the rest of the drive.

::


	2. Chapter 2

::

Okay, so Jaime hadn't been the most devoted wife, but she didn't really think that in any way called for Gary showing up to see her completely out of the blue when she needed to be at the track in less than a couple hours. She was serious about her bit of privacy on GP days, and he should have known that. It served him right, didn't it, if he'd noticed the fucked-out state of the room before she came out in a bathrobe and jumped back with a gunshot of a curse at the sight of him.

"Surprise," he said wryly. His eyes were passing over her, just hangdog enough to make her sympathetic, which made her boil over.

"What the hell, Gary?" She wrapped her towel around her without really thinking about it; he noticed this reflexive act, and noticing that he noticed made her feel even worse.

"Sorry. Bubbles had your other key, and I just saw him in the lobby." This time when he looked at her he noticed the swervy way she was moving. " _Jaime_ , can I really not expect you to be sober by the early afternoon?"

"Sometimes," she drew out in pointed sarcasm, "you don't expect things to happen and they happen anyway. Such as the fact that I now have a career, and cannot put a nice little hold on my life to speak to you when you barge into my hotel room seventy minutes before a drive."

"Excellent. Just excellent. You can't talk to me without being drunk, you can't go to a race without being drunk, you're a total _mess_ , and you're trying to tell me the timing's not right."

"My life is _fine_. Have you even noticed the things that I can do?"

"Of course I've _noticed_."

"What—"

From his coiled position on the bed, Oscar flinched his head up and gave a whimper that made her forget what she'd been thinking and then fizzle out. She made a frustrated drop of a gesture in the middle of throwing the towel off to pick up her jeans and slip into them. "Why did you come here? What do you want from me?"

He made an expression like he wanted to throw his hands up, stammering a bit before he emphatically said, "I don't want you to sleep with other people."

A sigh went in through her teeth, and out. "Why?"

"Jesus. Because you're my wife."

"It's so sad," she slowly said, "because you actually can't begin to understand how far that is from being the right answer."

"Do you want me to say that I love you, Jaime?" he asked, very serious now. "Is that actually, honestly, what you want to hear?"

Her voice was poisonous, bitten through this pulse of something turned stubborn inside of her. "Let's be honest, babe. You _love_ that I'm fooling around on you, and you love that everybody knows it, because it means that when you leave me, you can tell everyone it's because I was a whore, when the fact is you just didn't get what you expected from me. Look, we know it was too quick to really be love, but at least I was being the innocent kind of stupid. You did it because you wanted a pretty trophy, and when my cute trinket of a hobby turned out to be something I was damned good at, that didn't fit into your plans of me being the _groupie_ —"

"Are we being honest? You tell me if that really is what you think." He'd stepped closer, searching her eyes with a wounded astonishment she tried to tell herself wasn't as real as it looked. "You're right on one count: I wasn't in love with you when I married you. But I cared about you. I married you because I fancied you so much, I liked you so immediately, that I thought..."

His voice trailed off until he regathered himself.

"And though I think this must be the part you're the most convinced of," he finished with a tired ruefulness, "I didn't actually get on a plane and fly all the way over here, in order to leave you...But I'm beginning to think that's what you want me to do."

She stepped back from him, and the red of her overalls caught into her vision; the onset of the afternoon came roaring back, and suddenly she was pushing past Gary to throw up into the waste bin.

Gary sighed.

::

After he'd gone, Jaime blasted the radio and did a few jumping jacks, shook herself loose all over, and did a stupid little whoop before picking up her bag which had been half lying under the dog's paws. "What do you say, huh?" she said, patting Oscar messily between the ears. "It'll be grand, right? _Grand_. Fuck yes."

She stalled heading over as long as she could. Gary had mopped her head around; she didn't feel like grinning at the usual band of leerers and she didn't feel like eating anything and she definitely didn't feel like catching any snotty noise today from that tightass Niki Lauda, who of course had turned out to know enough about cars to talk and buy her cozy way into the Ferrari fraternity. There were already rumors abounding about how she'd been making her own alterations to the cars, all the while trying to do it under Enzo's nose; she had no qualms about keeping the mechanics up until four in the morning for half the week if it meant she could get herself a good car without rubbing insult towards her backer. Even back when Jaime first heard this she was able to guess Niki would have said it to his face if she wasn't too conscious of how that might have looked coming from the ponytailed weakling she probably looked like to him. As far as they'd be concerned, they were taking enough of a gamble on her already.

Jaime knew she couldn't have earned her way like that, and what she did have to make up for it in the eyes of even her most sincere benefactors had a lot to do with how the journalists would ask one driver about his methods and the next about his car and then her about whether she was wearing anything for good luck underneath her overalls. It was well-known that sometimes she wasn't wearing all that much, and she encouraged that kind of thing anyway, with the way she'd stall and flirt with their questions while reaching into some reporter's breast pocket for a cigarette he didn't offer her, then say something about leaving it up to their imaginations. Jaime didn't care if this was dirty business; many would say so was Lauda's way of moving up. What mattered was what happened when they were in the damn cars, when you could tell who was fast by who was fast. Every driver, not just the women, connected intimately with their cars for that very reason: they disguised almost every single thing about you that wasn't whether or not you could win.

::

Jaime's resentments over the condescending type of investment in her skills probably would have been far more sensible if launched at the general attitude of the sport, even sometimes at the fans. Once the points were being properly fought over, there was a shift in the tone at the pits or the union meetings, as if these two had overstayed their welcome by not simply putting in half of a good fight before falling promptly behind all the rest.

Neither of them were going to fall very far behind, the first couple races of '75 had attested, and the more mutually competent they appeared to be, the louder people talked. Despite Jaime's outlook on all of this being far more carefree than Niki's, surely she couldn't be oblivious to how the two of them always seemed to be singled out as a unit. The attention they were receiving was at close range very complimentary, but when that bewildered swarm of media attention was viewed from a distance, it tended to look suspiciously like a confused sort of outrage.

Inside the walls of the motor community it was less disguised. Of course women can compete in Formula sports, but they're not supposed to start earning points and _winning_ , and how the hell had they suddenly ended up with _two_ of them crawling up the grid? Niki knew through a reliable rumor that somebody from Tyrrell had been chewing the hell out of Jody Scheckter because he couldn't get the edge on "a couple of fucking birds."

If the two of them had been friends, they might have been able to make into a joke whatever intricate radical feminist conspiracy these assholes were cooking up in their imaginations; but they weren't, and the waters between them were becoming a lot more turbulent with how much they repeatedly resented the assumptions that they were in on some kind of agenda together. (It was all the more ridiculous considering they weren't the only deviations from the men's club; Niki would have gladly taken Lella Lombardi over Hunt as her publicized foil, considering the two of them could actually stand each other for more than ten minutes at a time, but the Italian was currently struggling with lack of practice and a sub-par car to get very far past qualifying.) At Belgium, which Lauda later learned took place less than a week after Gary had phoned Jaime asking for a divorce, Niki made a bland quip about something that got Jaime so roaring-mad that she chucked her helmet at one of the stands hard enough to make a split in the wood. Regazzoni once made the offhand comment around the journalists that he was "pretty sure those two would rather swallow petrol than work for the same team." Nobody seemed to be taking note.

But there was, perhaps just as significantly, earnest support from fans who simply saw them as talented women. The year before in Spain had been Niki's first ever GP win, and she'd been only as happy as any driver at snagging first, not really making room for the note that no other woman had ever done that before. As soon as her helmet came off, the screaming had made her look around and wonder if there had been an accident, but it was some identically dressed group of university girls spilling out of the stands that was making a good amount of cries almost too shrilly exalted to be described as cheers; then Niki realized the clanging of quick talk from every corner of the audience was about her, and the women and men were running down to hoist her up above their shoulders. Niki would be lying if she said she never thought of that moment, never slapped and stuck it to the top of her mind, whenever Jaime seemed to be getting all the attention.

::

For Jaime the finish line might as well have gone up in dust as soon as Niki passed it, even though she'd known going in that only a grave mistake would make the Austrian fall far enough behind to not take the championship. Ronnie helped her out of her panting quiet of defeat by pulling her out of the car with the good words about always-next-year while the crowd crooned.

In all honesty, Jaime was looking forward to a moment alone so she could suck on her self-pity for just a bit. She'd thought at least she could be the first champ, if not the first to win a GP. She could put on the right face for the rest of the night, but there was no doubt she'd be getting roaring drunk or promptly laid back at the lodge; whichever was made available first, she didn't even feel like picking.

But her plans for distractions were interrupted when it became clear something was up around the pits. Crowds were gathered loosely around Ferrari's section, and when Jaime caught sight of Niki, she saw none of the proper ease of someone who had just taken the cup.

Finally she caught the shoulder of somebody who was able to explain that an inspection had stalled them at the Ferrari. She got closer to the excitement just in time to hear the conclusion that there was water in the fuel. Jaime was only just near enough to Niki to see her eyes go still and wide and to hear her flat proclamation of "No, there isn't."

"What happened with the afternoon inspections?" Jaime muttered to Ronnie.

"Didn't they spot-check for time? They probably missed her."

Regazzoni, at first rather valiant about this situation considering his points had unexpectedly thrown him up to second in the last few placements, immediately asked if they would also examine his car, the implication being that if his fuel had also been diluted neither of the Ferrari drivers should be accused of having anything to do with it. Niki looked not very optimistic and seemingly even annoyed at this show of solidarity. She declared, "They'll have to double-check the exact percentages. It won't be over regulation."

Clay was still trying to smooth this over for her; Jaime heard him saying something about an easy appeal, seemingly convinced that if the two of them swore up and down they hadn't tampered in any way with what was in the cylinders, the punishment surely shouldn't affect the whole team. Jaime was waiting for what Niki would say when there was a snide comment from her side, one of the team supporters she didn't know sounding very satisfied with this turn of events, but in what was supposed to look like begrudging the spirit of getting anyone's hopes up in terms of earning a higher placement, Jaime said in irritation to Bubbles, "No, no. This is Niki Lauda we're talking about; if that sample comes up even one percent wet, I'll douche myself with it."

Some of the drivers hung back for the impressively long time it took for the scrutineers and FIA brass to finish out the deliberating, as they hadn't even announced the detailed results of the inspection yet, going so long they had to adjourn for a good while at midnight and then come back half an hour later. A lot of the drivers left to go get the party underway back at the Lodge, while others waited for the verdict while juicing right out in the parking lots; still more were genuinely anxious about the outcome, waiting around in the same storm clouds that struck down in vulgar opinions where many of the fans were hanging by the trailers.

When they gave the championship to Regazzoni, Jaime knew it by the way the press blew in to meet somebody leaving the hearing and it was Niki, head down, expressionless, refusing to speak.

Now that the cup was his, Clay seemed to have changed his tune. When asked whether he thought his win was fair, he gave some vague and obvious answer about how he couldn't question the judgment and experience of the FIA; he felt Niki was just as capable a driver but rules were rules.

A lot of the lads made their exits with thoughtful scowling expressions, and there was quite a noise of outrage from the fans, but what seemed the loudest was the college boy Jaime overheard shouting, "Cheating loser shrew!" just as Niki glinted off behind the closing door of a cab. Jaime found herself watching everyone very closely, for a long time, before she finally stomped out her cigarette and started asking around about who was driving back to the hotel.

::

That night all of the partying out at Seneca Lodge came blasting up in prompt indifference to the controversy, of course. If Niki had already suspected she'd regret being convinced by Clay that she should get a room where all the other boys would be hanging out, she could only hope now that people might be thoughtful enough to keep the volume reasonable where they knew her cabin was close by.

Earlier that morning, the messenger that told her she was close to where Jaime was staying had come in the form of a German Shepherd she could easily recognize by now. Oscar had come up barking happily at her when she first came out to sit and have a think on the porch. Niki had settled down a bit lower in her chair to run her socked foot over the dog's snout, muttering in German to the animal, some tease about how the woman can never afford to bring along any of her boyfriends and yet she always manages to cart along her number one bitch. When Jaime's voice finally came offhandedly yelling for the dog, Niki had sat back up, not wanting to be caught in such an act as being friendly to Hunt's favorite pet, but Oscar went obediently panting off at the first flicker of his own name before Jaime could have even noticed her up there under the awning.

After everything that had happened afterwards, Niki knew she was in no mood to see or hear much more of Jaime tonight, though what occurred later wasn't exactly the kind of disruption she expected.

First there was her attempt to get tucked in for the night, interrupted by a knock at her door. There was Clay, stopping her coldness as she opened with "Can I come in and talk?"

"No you may not," she replied simply, and when he lingered in her doorway looking frustrated, she put her hands up as if to demand, _What do you want from me?_ "Leave."

Recognizing her mood, he left, but she saw far over his shoulder that Ronnie Peterson was approaching and waving for her attention, his expression friendly. Peterson was often almost uncomfortably kind to her, if perhaps not any nicer than he was to anyone else, but on a night when she was expecting jibes from half the guys she was willing to let him approach. He invited her to come get a beer—if she liked beer—and play some cards next to one of the campfires.

She told him she'd think on it before shutting the door, and it took her a while to decide that she actually would go, even if it was mostly to avoid some appearance of sour grapes that would doubtlessly carry over into next year in a subtle but obvious burn down the rumor rope. So she went, and the other boys had the decency to not mention her disqualification, and if she was really reading into it, it almost seemed that their invitation had been in the spirit of wishing they could be congratulating her.

She was losing interest and about to head back in about forty minutes later, when the bang crackled and zoomed into their earshot: Fireworks? But then the shrill bark of a woman's voice carrying over from the other side past Niki's cabin; a second after the voice dropped out of its sharpness into a peel of furious cursing, and was recognizable.

There had been a collective flinch of surprise, but the others' shoulders loosened down just as fast, a few of them laughing. "Sounds like Hunt's gotten into some sailer's flare guns or some shite," somebody joked.

Ronnie, even though he wasn't electing to do anything, doubtfully muttered, "That was pretty loud."

In a dutiful breath of getting up Niki was already hopping over one of the logs, taking off at a jog. Her pace staggered over uneven ground just as she heard Oscar's angry yelping becoming constant and she was able to follow the sound to her earlier best guess of which door Jaime was behind, up the stairs of one of the two-story cabins. The handle turned, and Niki—later she'd realize how stupid this could have looked, her not even bothering to knock or peak in slowly—bolted right through, her system prickling all over with alarm.

The first thing there was to see was the broiling half-donut of a man in his underwear curling on the floor from a kick to the stomach, and not the first he was receiving, Jaime no less convicting in the one she now landed to his groin for the way she seemed off-balance, her hands tied behind her back in one of her own belts.

"Fucking _bitch_!" the man was moaning. To the left was the dangerous sound of Oscar's claws raining scratches down the other side of the closed bathroom door as he still barked and barked.

The glances only turned her way at the same moment that the motion of something ticking on the floor brought Niki's glance down with a step back and a total stilling: a handheld pistol spinning along the floor from some throw like the middle of somebody's phantom roulette circle.

" _Schiesse_ ," Niki swore quietly.

"—I swear, it wasn't supposed to be loaded!" the man was hollering between an angry clenching of teeth.

He was clearly fighting nausea, and Jaime toed her top far out of his way on the floor. "Check how many bullets are in that," she said to Niki.

"I've never handled a gun," Niki protested, her voice almost drowned by Oscar's clamoring. "And what are you going to do if there's more, use it on him?"

"What the _fuck_ ," the man groaned. He was American, blond, and didn't look interesting enough to be worth a tenth of this trouble. Niki rolled her eyes and took off the sweater she'd had tied at her waist to glove over her hand as she leaned over to pick up the gun, turning it over until she figured out how to flick the safety on. Then she set it on the bed and came over to help Jaime to wriggle out of the belt faster, her other hand already reaching for the phone.

"Front desk?...I need you to send up the police. I heard a shot fired in the cabin just next to me, a lot of us up here heard it."

Jaime looked relieved for a second at Niki's neutral show of vagaries, and then some reflexive bit of panic made her hiss to herself, "Ah, _shit_." As Niki gave a couple more one-word answers to the clerk and then hung up, her eyes were following Jaime as she grabbed her bag and ducked into the bathroom, finally letting Oscar topple out into the room. Niki was trying to figure this out until she heard the toilet flushing a couple times: drugs, in case the cops had any reason to poke around the scene.

Giving a blank look with a clear enough meaning to Jaime's yankee still fighting for control of his breath, Niki sat on the bed and took the gun into her lap. After a short moment curiosity got the best of her and she examined the revolver until she saw how to click the barrels open to check for bullets.

"Two others, Jaime," she said.

"...What?" she sounded like she'd forgotten Niki was out there.

"Two other rounds in here. Is there any way he can get out the back?" she then thought to ask. Oscar was growling vaguely in response to the man's hard, chagrined glance. Niki whispered, "It's okay, boy," giving him a short scratching at the ears.

"No, that's a good idea," Jaime said as she came out. "We'll just camp outside the door until they get here."

We?

A knock on the door: somebody sounding a bit drunk or just very nonchalant: "Okay in there?"

"Sod off, Jody," Jaime called back mildly. "I've already got a dog."

"Cheeky, I'm just _checking_..."

Niki had to say, "Aren't you going to put something on?" when Jaime was about to step outside in the bra and underwear she'd been wearing this whole time. The woman's nerves weren't too obvious, but she seemed very bent on getting out of the same room as this fucker as soon as possible, and when Niki said it she blinked hazily around and then grabbed a bathrobe. Niki noticed the strong flex of her back muscles as she shrugged into it, and for some reason only defined vaguely by all this small chaos, that odd catch of her full attention on Jaime brought home the last ten minutes in a sudden jarring way.

"Was he trying to kill you?" she finally asked, when they were on the porch and would have looked from far away the very picture of two friends lazing together on their vacation.

"I don't think that was exactly it. It was more that he wanted to get off on me not knowing he could do it at any second, you know? Like, ' _Ooghh_ , the bitch is a risk-taker, eh?'" Jaime went on with helpfully explicit gestures, "I didn't know what he was after when he brought it out, but he just wanted me to like, fellate it, play around with it. I've done weirder. But he started getting bickery when I noticed the safety was off, so then I started to get put out, but I pretended I wasn't so that it was easier to take it from him. And then when it was actually in my hands he looked very uneasy indeed."

"And then you blew your top."

She made a little tongue-click. "Well..."

"What did you shoot at?"

"...Just a little test shot," she said, raising her brows in a quick jump. "Remember I'd have been shooting behind my back if I'd actually been trying to hit him. He scrambled back fast either way, and then when I was recovering from that isound/i he was trying to kick me over. I was so pissed off I just let the gun go flying and started kicking."

"What do you think his side of the story's going to be?"

Jaime made a scoff. "Who gives a fuck?"

"You ought to tell them he said or did something more obviously threatening to make you fire a warning shot. Tell it like it happened, just don't make the police think that you thought you had it under control at that moment."

Jaime turned her head with her expression furrowed in brief surprise, then looked back ahead, considering this.

"I ran back to my room to get my jacket," Niki said, standing up, "so we didn't talk and I don't even know your side of the story."

By the time Niki got back from going through these motions, the uniform officers who'd been sent up were finishing their preliminary routine with Jaime and calling in some investigators. They told Niki she'd probably be wanted for interviewing and should make her way over to the main offices to meet them there. Niki rolled her eyes, knowing they'd probably make the two of them wait for a long time while they checked out the lodge room, which turned out to be right when the parade took almost a couple hours to get started, and Jaime took so much time getting over there it seemed she'd come to this assumption herself and didn't care if the detectives had to wait a few minutes.

Aside from her lack of punctuality, though, when Jaime appeared slinking around the corner of the fireplace she was an impressively deceiving picture of the safe-as-candy dolls that tended to come out of stiff English private school upbringings, complete with a skirt and blouse Niki couldn't believe she would have had in her own luggage and should have looked a little strange on anyone this late at night, and the rote vocabulary acquired solely from whatever she must have jotted in the margins while reading James Joyce, though even that detail seemed an idea formed upon a character rather than the way Jaime would ever willingly behave; even her mispronunciations of several-syllable words seemed part of the act.

Niki only saw her introduced to a couple of the cops with this mild-mannered disguise put up, but while she was taken into a separate room by one of the investigators, she was half-distracted with this notion that Jaime would probably be pretending to be shy and blushing while explaining the sex acts, no wagging fists or crude slang, not from Miss Hunt for the rest of tonight. And probably, unless they recognized her first, there would only be the implication that she was friends with one of the drivers and not one herself.

This idea really pissed her off, and what confused and pissed her off even more was the realization that while it did make her angry at Jaime, mostly it made her angry _for_ her.

They let them both back out into the main lobby at almost the same time, and there was a cold locked stillness in Jaime's expression, for a couple seconds, before she spotted Niki and stood against a high easy chair with her arms crossed, eyes going a little sleepier.

"Are those your clothes?" Niki muttered almost as low as a whisper as she stood in next to her, both of them waiting as the detectives convened with each other.

Small, conspiratorial smile without turning her head: "Well, the shoes are mine."

"Really?" Now Niki was tilting her head for a closer look at the slouchy suede boots and making a flat-to-the-ground gesture as she remarked, "I like those: low heels, no bullshit. You should try wearing something on your feet more than once every couple years."

When Jaime did a put-upon rolling of her eyes and smirked, Niki realized she was happy to have distracted her somehow.

"Do you think the other police will be scouting the party?"

"Sure they will," Jaime said, shaking her head. "Somebody's getting done for possession tonight for sure."

"You'd better be prepared for them to blame that on you for a while."

"They will, but I'll just tell them it was you who insisted on calling the police."

Niki had no reason to rise to this. "That sounds like something they think I would do."

She was about to finally ask about the American, though later her suspicions would be more or less confirmed by the rumors—struggling university athlete from a wealthy family, presumably trying to get the upper hand in some fucked up way over the big-titted F1 slag—but the detectives came up to tell them they could leave now before Niki could really follow this thought into a question that would only sound tactfully interested. And then, just as she turned to leave:

"Aren't you heading back to your room?"

She looked Jaime's way. "I'm up anyway. Might as well go running."

"...It's four in the morning," Jaime said with a slow, uncomprehending look. Then she added, "At the end of the season."

"Next season will be here before you know it. I'll see you then."

"...Hey. Niki."

Niki had to turn back again on her way out.

Jaime gnawed lightly at her lip, then nodded, "I'm sorry you didn't quite win, huh?"

In all of a second their brief peace went hard as ice. "That's one way of looking at it," Niki said, turning to go. She may have heard Jaime trying to call to her again on her way out the door, but it was hard to be sure.

::


	3. Chapter 3

::

Despite Niki's '75 disqualification, or perhaps because of it, she was still a frequent focus for the press at the beginning of the next season. And in fact by that time it was impossible to overlook that there was a certain drone of agitation towards the FIA—probably not righteously motivated as often as rooted in the unease that such a strict coming down on regulations could result in any of them ending up with such a rough call.

Niki probably would have insisted that the lack of mercy the judges had given her had everything to do with the fact that she was a woman, Jaime thought, as if it were any secret that being likable certainly might have helped her at any crossroads of controversy; but on the other hand some of the lads didn't seem to think it had _anything_ to do with that, and Jaime just told all of them and herself time and again that that was last year and she was sick of hearing about it either way.

No one really talked about whether or not they thought Niki had had any idea there was water in the injection; really the thing that made you notice was how little they said about it. Jaime hadn't been there for her infamous first interview after qualifying rounds, where she'd apparently dug her claws into her privacy harder than ever, and every single question related to last year's ruling prompted her to tersely answer, "Next question, please."

Three inquiries in a row got this treatment, until someone asked if she was worried about Jaime's slick steal on pole placement and her vocabulary blossomed right back up: "Well, it's clear that Hunt did her homework over the holiday for once, but do I think she has the dedication to keep up that performance through the whole season? Definitely not."

"Did Jaime Hunt have anything to say to you about your disqualification last year?"

"Possibly. Next question, please."

In fact the two of them had yet to speak at all that year which, if Jaime really thought about it, was strange: For all their disagreements, it took quite a bit of talking to work up that friction, and it used to be rare for a race to go by without them exchanging at least a few remarks. The impression of coldness Niki had left on their association the last time they saw each other during the previous year had somehow seeped long past the amount of time that Jaime was usually capable of feeling any grudge with anyone. She had already taken to calling Niki "the sour kraut" in front of the teammates (at least until it was clear she wasn't even going to be provoked into reminding anyone that she was not from Germany), assuming Niki was just taking out her bitter energy on her biggest rival, but even as she continued to ridicule the way she'd fallen out of favor she couldn't get rid of the rank taste in her mouth, the idea that she had said or done the wrong thing at the wrong time even though she obviously didn't owe Niki a damn thing.

At Kyalami, Jaime's second position had gotten disqualified after somebody called for a perhaps not-so-impromptu car inspection and McLaren just had to make a fool out of themselves for making too wide a car by about the breadth that a baby could push the whole thing forward; after this the disasters came one after the other. Jaime saw red through the next couple engine failures before giving into a roaring resignation that maybe they just didn't _know_ how to make a machine that could actually operate within the limits. In the garage, one of her mechanics was getting rather affronted at this vulgarly expressed suggestion when Jaime saw their new guy looking puzzled, and turned to see none other than Niki Lauda watching this play out with some kind of easily detachable interest.

"What do you want?" Jaime demanded, after John had gotten back to bickering with Teddy.

With a tone that would have made plenty more sense if she had actually been expected, Niki made a gesture to the car and then said, "I think we're both getting tired of this."

Jaime scoffed. "And?"

"Supposing I came to take a look at the car myself," she said, "you'd probably have to be very careful to make sure this didn't get past anyone in this room, unless you wanted to give Ferrari some reason to be suspicious, or at least pissed off at me, and I don't even like talking to Luca as much as I have to."

"Fuck me sweetly," Jaime exclaimed, laughing her confrontational laugh, "are you taking the piss?"

Niki, perhaps not understanding the idiom, searched the garage with her piercing little eyes instead of saying anything back.

"Right," Jaime slowly said, "putting aside that I have no clue why you would _want_ to stick your nose into our dilemma..."

"Why would we even let you?" one of the men interrupted, putting a twitch into Niki's agenda of what to do with her face. "How do we know you're not trying to do something to make the problem even worse?"

"Because that would be illegal," Niki said evenly, clearly convinced he was a total idiot, but this soon after the race Jaime was feeling too irritated with everyone who looked at her to really be offended on his behalf. Besides, Harry was sort of "the gum-swallowing type," as one of Jaime's old boyfriends used to say.

Pulling Jaime a bit to the side, John hissed, "This isn't your call. Any second Caldwell could come in here and you know he wouldn't—"

"I don't know what he'd do, but I doubt he'd outright throw away a potential solution."

Harry whispered, "Yeah, but the dyke cheat? We'll be lucky if—"

"Say it loud enough for her to hear you or shove it right back up your mother because I'm not in the mood," Jaime said in a low snap, then went over to Niki.

They took several strides over to the edge of the garage, and Jaime crossed her arms as she slowed and turned in to face her.

"What?" Niki demanded, when Jaime's look at her was heavy with a question.

"What is this all about? You're way too far up your own arse about your smarts to be sharing it with somebody else this easily. Now the sudden spirit of charity?"

She hesitated, comfortably making Jaime wait a moment for her to find the right words for it. "I don't know if you've ever talked much to Lombardi, but last year she bought me a drink, and she asked me if I ever got nervous, with all the pressure. She said that when she started she was always getting paranoid that she would make some totally amateur mistake, because if she spun out she knew that everyone in the audience would point and say, 'See? That's a woman driver for you.'"

Jaime looked back for a flat little moment, then gave a groaning sigh. "Oh, good lord. You're one of those. Look, I am not here to prove anything about women's liberation. I'm just here to win."

Niki pointed back at the car. "It doesn't matter if it's the fault of the rest of your team, they will always choose to see the car failing as you failing, and you failing is both of us failing."

"What's a little bit of...humiliation osmosis," Jaime said, crafting the description upon the air with a motion of her lighter as she was getting out a cigarette, "to the only driver besides me who doesn't give a shiny fuck what anyone else thinks?"

"It's not about what people think about _me_ ," Niki said, slowly and speaking with a flicker of earnest surprise. A hint of a frustrated squint: "If you don't get it now, maybe you never will, and I don't see why I should waste time trying to explain it to you. Are you going to take this or not?...I need you out there. I need you in second."

Last year had slipped into the conversation somehow, slyly, and Jaime couldn't press her finger on it but she felt that Niki's low and almost constant hint of an almost betrayed sort of mood had as much to do with what the judges had laid on her as it did with what had been laid on Jaime later that same night, and that she'd helped her then; though the connection between those two things couldn't be defined, not really, so where did that feeling even come from? And as for that condescending last bit: "Are you going to be a smug pain in my skull about it for the rest of the year?"

"Not any more than usual. And don't expect any sneaky debt collection." Niki gave a tiny hint of a smirk. "What would I even be trying to get you to owe me?"

Jaime could only scoff at this transparent arrogance: you would think it had never in Niki's life occurred to her she could use that rapport of mundane favors that normal people got themselves into by simply getting acquainted. "Fine," she finally said, and went over to begin trying to convince the guys that this wasn't the worst idea in the world.

Later she wasn't interested in the details, she just wanted to know if they thought Niki's advice made sense. They conceded that she'd had some good ideas but warned Jaime that since one of them needed to be in Glasgow by the end of the week they'd have to practically work round the clock to do everything that needed to be done in time to have the car ready for Anderstorp.

"Oh, was that her plan all along?" Jaime teased. "To _exhaust_ my poor team straight into obscurity?...Get it done, boys."

When Sweden did come around she felt a sense of very brief dread when she first got in the car, but it drove like a dream, and she took second with a high whoop of relief spinning around in her head, and then claimed first in France the following month. Niki had of course racked up a decent amount of points during McLaren's troubles and seemed unfazed, if not infuriatingly satisfied, by her catching up. Jaime couldn't burn off the feeling that she'd become an allegedly predictable pawn in some long plot, which only pushed her harder to end up making Niki utterly regretful that she'd ever helped her.

If only her nerves weren't acting up so badly. Something in this past year had begun to press harder than usual on the seesaw of her resolve, as if the more furious her drive became to win, the more desperate her brief moments of uncertainty became.

 _Uncertainty_? She was dashing off to vomit several times before every race. At this point she could always be counted on to have quickly scanned for where the nearest toilet was close to the pits, or whose trailer had one she could duck into with a cavalier wink of gratitude, because she would never ever be caught dead throwing up her lunch in front of one of the guys, or letting that get around to the press. It was too laughable, too pathetic. She glared hard at herself in the mirror one time after the stalls had been a flat plane of locked doors and she'd had to let it up in one of the sinks.

There were moments, very brief but always vivid and sour with near-resolve, when she wondered how much longer she could take this, being trapped in this sickening breadth between fear of dying and fear of failing. These moments were in the end mostly just tantrums she worked at until they became some contradictory form of motivation, but at the edge of her ability to power forward was always some mental punch of self-berating that lingered like a bad cocktail with her usual confidence.

She doubted Niki ever got nervous.

Nürburgring was already taking a nice long bath when they arrived in late July, and as usual the crews didn't make much of it except with the usual graveyard humor. They had a couple days to kill, so Jaime tucked her head into a few drinks with some of the boys, and would have been happy to drink several more, when Niki approached her and asked if she could have a word with her later.

"Like...?" Jaime cut her eyes away from a couple of the distracted gents, indicating some understanding that this nuisance was somehow a private matter, and shrugged. "I'm in room 402. Any time later tonight."

Niki nodded and walked off, and Jaime patted the bar for another gin.

::

When Niki knocked on the door of Jaime's room she was expecting to hear the usual tangle of voices on the other side of the door, but Jaime came promptly to answer it and Niki was surprised to see that if there had been any company, they'd all been cleared out. The long dresser in the room was a little cluttered with empty bottles and cans, but it wasn't the detritus of partying one would usually expect from Jaime's lairs, if it even was a room she herself had rented; she rarely hesitated to beg or borrow, and Niki hoped they wouldn't be barged in on by some date of hers from the night before.

Niki took a seat at the little octagonal table next to the window while they sort of made conversation. Jaime boasted that somebody had given her some prime vintage scotch while she poured some into a couple glasses, sliding one to Niki without even asking first if she wanted it. Niki wrapped her fingers around the glass but only turned it in idle clockwise movements while Jaime contentedly sampled hers, going on about how hard it was to safely package such a bottle for a long trip. Niki was half listening until the woman finally sat lazily back and asked, "So what is it?"

She hesitated, but only in a brief calculating few blinks. "I think the union should be called to do a vote."

A silence poked the air, whirlwinded softly by the constant patter and wind outside. Jaime flicked some ashes from her cigarette into an empty can. "About?"

Opening her hands to indicate it was obvious, Niki said, "Nürburgring? The track is overdue to be retired, it should have been voted out of the circuit already, and with the weather—"

"Right, we voted on it at the beginning of the season? You want to call for a vote _again_ , what, less than 36 hours before the race? You're talking about a _strike_. And without the authority to—"

"We have the authority, we have every right to refuse to drive. What, we risk our lives because a few people already bought their plane tickets?"

"We risk our lives day in, day out, Niki. Why are you coming to me about this?"

"Because I want you to be the one to call the meeting."

Jaime hummed into a snigger, shaking her head, pausing, then just laughing again. "Oh, why? Because nobody likes you? Time for your utter lack of diplomacy to bite you in the arse, Lauda, because we are not on the same side here. And anyway, what makes you think _I_ could convince the boys of some point that I don't even care about?"

It was interesting that Jaime would so easily imply it herself, but it was probably true that she wasn't much more popular than Niki, despite all appearances of the crowds finding her as often as she went looking for a good time. She and Jody regularly exchanged affectionate insults around the pits, and Ronnie was quick to defend Jaime when the other guys talked lewd mockery behind her back, but she wasn't really befriended by any of the drivers in any way that stuck. Buddies came and went, or they tolerated her for the entertainment, but the general clamor of her recklessness and belligerence made her prone to making the types of messes that stopped being funny after the third or fourth incident of the spilled insult, the shattered family heirloom, the police knocking at the door. She was irresistible, yet redundantly so: equally beloved and begrudged, easy to earn yet impossible to own, and so utterly beautiful and warm that it was a shock to the system when you hadn't seen her in a while, making the whole cycle of contradictions begin all over again. There was all that, but Niki also got the general sense that the novelty wore off right around the time any of them got wind of her little personal policy that she wouldn't sleep with fellow drivers.

For all these reasons, Niki had nearly given up on the whole idea of speaking to her about this, but still: "You are not so diplomatic yourself, but you do have charm."

Still only engaging with amusement, Jaime tilted her head in a wincing way. "You haven't touched the scotch, go on now. What about Regazzoni? Why not talk him into it?"

Jaime damn well had some idea why she wouldn't go to Clay. "We're not on best terms."

"You mean since last year?" Jaime prodded, betraying a magnificently invasive side Niki had never observed her to have before, but it wasn't exactly surprising.

"And he doesn't have the charisma. My point is you know how to be one of the guys, or..." Niki made an annoyed gesture, struggling to express in English a little more than usual. "You know how to make them feel like they can get away with things. They all know how badly you don't want to back down, which is why they might consider if it came from you. You can appeal to all this macho bullshit so that they don't feel like cowards for voting no."

"You keep forgetting that _I'm_ not convinced. That 'macho bullshit' is a job, and I need the points from this race."

"Stop pretending that you're not scared, Jaime." Niki gave her an unrelenting look, stooping to follow her eyes as she cast a dismissing glance down at her drink. "Do you think I'm fooled? By your trips to the toilet, all the extra drinking every night before...?"

"You—" Jaime's lips were tight. "I'm not scared. If you're scared, it's not my problem."

"...You know, maybe if you were a man I could understand thing, but I think a woman should know when it takes more balls to drop the show."

Jaime started to worry at her forehead with a couple fingers.

"You really want to be just another attention-seeking child too stupid to come out of the storm? Do you not remember Spain last year, the consequences then?"

"You have got to be joking, you have to be—that's the coldest bitch thing, to bring up Spain, alright. The _audience_ isn't supposed to get hurt; none of that should have happened and everybody's had the integrity to admit some bad decisions were made, but that was a different circumstance."

"My point is," Niki slowly appeased, "everybody knew from the beginning that we shouldn't do the drive—"

"They threatened to _impound the cars_."

"Even then. They couldn't have done that to everyone, even if it was more than a rumor. But one person relented and got in the car; as soon as one person is willing to do that, these idiots have this idea that it makes everyone after that a coward if he doesn't get in. It's people's lives, it's not right. If we call a strike, no one is a coward; the votes don't even have to leave the room."

Jaime had leaned a bit forward and was pointing the grasp of her cigarette at Niki. "That included you. In Spain. And Lella too: every one of the ladies, and most of the lads."

"Lombardi, and I, and you, all get twice the pressure when something like this happens; while they're out there trying to prove they've got more brass than the next guy, we're trying just to prove we belong in the sport at all. Lella got her half-point that day, but she said later she couldn't stop thinking what it would have been like in Stommelen's place. And you know it isn't just about the barriers or the public; they run the show for the bottom line, and then somebody has to die for them to pay to improve the tracks. It's a disgrace."

Jaime's look had taken on a more calculating depth as she blew out a plume of smoke. "But you've got to understand I'm in a position to be very suspicious about your sudden spirit of unity. After all, you—you, personally—can always refuse to drive. The fact is we both know that the reason you're here is because this is in your best interests as a competitor."

"I'm not going to deny that it is an advantage that I have already scored enough points to be in a high standing; as for me not being willing to refuse to race as long as the race goes on, I've made no attempt to hide that either."

"The thing that you're trying to hide," Jaime said with a strange slowness, a gracefully irritated tone, "is that you are asking me for a favor, when you know fully well that I don't have to give you one."

The realization that Jaime was angry seemed to have jostled the room. Niki had never seen such a subtle, doled-out emotion play out of the woman's usually abrupt airs, and suddenly had no idea what she was supposed to say.

"You could at least have the decency to glaze over the fact that you're just trying to use me as some puppet, when Christ, I can count on one hand how many times you've condescended to speak to me this entire season." Jaime seemed almost as surprised by her own severity as Niki was, her eyes flicking over the circumstances, her motions fidgeting. Getting louder now: "And you expect to be able to reason with me as a woman when you don't even respect me as a _person_ , I mean, I 'make the guys feel like they can get away with things'? Am I supposed to wink just the right way to make them think if they agree with me they'll—get something from me later on—"

Flummoxed off the script, Niki stammered, " _No_ , Jaime, I didn't—"

"Give me a break, Lauda, you don't think I notice the general smog of superior scoffing coming from your direction when I pass you up with a couple boyfriends? You act like I'm your embarrassing problem cousin or something, you've done that ever since you barely knew me. You want to try to tell me now you don't think you're better than me because you don't go for a good time every once in a while?"

"At least I'm better than saying things about you to the boys." This was absolutely true; on principle, for all it was impossible for Clay or the other guys to not notice that Niki didn't like Jaime, she'd never even once shit-talked her in front of a man about anything other than their work. And yet, Niki sensed this was not the point, it was weak, and though she managed to say it with a stiff flatness she was still innerly marveling at how badly this all had shifted outside of her understanding. On rote, she added, "So I don't know what you expected from me."

"Yeah, I don't know either." Jaime was lighting another cigarette with perfectly oiled snaps of motion. "Inviting you into my room, pouring you some of my birthday present, and you don't even touch the stuff. For Christ sake, would you just have a drink and get out?"

"I don't—" Niki felt a blade of tension in the air that made her not finish her statement as Jaime glared, and instead she picked up the scotch in a weak forfeiting gesture, and made for the door with the whole glass.

Finding herself alone on the elevator, she uncrossed her arms to take a frowning sip. Strong stuff for sure. She still tasted a hint of the ripe burn of it going down her throat when she went to bed.

::


	4. Chapter 4

::

About forty hours after Niki left Jaime to sulk in her hotel room, Jaime's mood had lifted high up on top of her hard-stolen first place victory and she'd already had a couple drinks to celebrate. She was piggy-backing a university boy around the parking lot while trying to hackle one of his mates into getting a pair of shoes out of his car to show off his tap-dancing skills, and hadn't noticed the relative quiet.

When Clay grabbed at her insistently on the way into the hotel, a brief swerve of irritation made her pull back sharply just as he said, "You're making a fool of yourself acting like it's any other night, Hunt."

"What's gotten into you?" Jaime sniggered and did a pinching shake at his cheeks to pull his mouth into a pucker.

There was a dangerous tension in the way he dragged her hand off. "For fuck sake. Do you not know what's going on with Niki?"

"Right, she had a bit of a shunt." Jaime waved this off. "She's had little breaks before, and they always exaggerate these things—"

"Jaime—"

"She'll be _fine_ , Clay," she said, her tone going more honest as she noticed the depth of his concern, and then the lobby seemed to slow to some icy truth when she finally focused past her own drunkenness, on his face. But just then he shook his head, not in the mood to be patient with her, and stormed off.

She stole away from the guys and found out quickly where his room was, whispering, "Oh shit," to herself as she knocked on the door. "Oh shit, oh come on. So fucking stupid."

When he opened with a grunt of surprise, she shouldered past him and into the room.

"How bad is it?"

"What do you want? Ask anyone else. _Anyone_."

"How bad?" she repeated, shouting this time.

"What do you think?...The whole car exploded into flames and she was trapped for about a minute in there. Third degree burns, toxic fumes, lung damage." He met her stunned paralysis with his darkly bitter glance for a moment, probably realizing how slowly this was taking to sink in when he said, "It would be a miracle if she's still alive in the morning."

Jaime noticed that the clock on his nightstand was off and thought that she should point that out to him. She remembered, out of nowhere, that she still hadn't sent her sister any of the postcards she'd promised. A couple more thoughts just barely hiccuped out of nowhere, and then she poshly said, "Excuse me," and backed up to run into his bathroom and throw up.

He brought her a glass with ice in it, a wan look giving away he'd rather be alone even as he crossed his arms and patiently waited for her to wash her mouth out and then fill up the glass to drink. It took her a second to speak without some weird gulping noise coming up first. "God, of all people..."

"You honestly didn't hear anything?"

"Sure, I knew there was a wreck, but there are wrecks all the time. Niki just isn't the type to go and get herself killed."

Clay made a small cold snort, earning a slow glare from Jaime.

"And what is all this righteous knight stuff anyway?" Jaime gulped down most of the water on her way out of the bathroom.

"What?"

"Oh, come on." She set the glass down in a blunt tang of sound, turned on him. "You've got some neck, you know, putting on the superior Lauda pal act? After you threw her under the bus last year?"

She expected the same script of defensiveness he'd been giving the magazines, the new and improved stubborn arsehole edition you got behind closed doors with every one of these pricks; but as soon as she'd said it there was a chastised sigh, his mouth opening as if to the temptation to admit something, before he put on some forced indifference and was probably about to start hinting that she should leave.

"What?" Jaime demanded, and a heavy indecision seemed to come over him, so she stepped a bit closer. "Clay. _What_?"

Accepting that this was not the type of night for dishonesty, Clay's frown took on a different quality, and he said, "We'd better sit down for a while."

Jaime did sit down for about half the story, but after only a couple minutes she was pacing around the table by the window, raking her hair out of her eyes again and again. "What time was this?"

"I don't think I could remember. Late. The only reason I hadn't gone in was because I'd misplaced my keys. I was heading back to the garage to look for them there when I saw somebody leaving. Two men; that's all I could tell."

"But—"

"Didn't think anything of it at the time. But I do remember, in the morning, Niki asked one of the guys—Moretti, I think—what he'd done to the car. He was only confused, and I'm sure he'd done nothing. See, they must have been in a hurry..."

"Something about the car wasn't like she'd left it."

"But of course she thought it was no big thing at first. And when I overheard that, I didn't even think about the night before."

"But then I presume, because you're not some useless son of a bitch, that you mentioned it later?" Jaime was raising her eyebrows, but it wasn't really sarcasm. She still wasn't sure where the hell this story was leading.

"I was right there next to Niki after the inspection was on. I told her..." This was where the regret came over him again. "The first thing she said was, 'Don't tell anyone else. No one. I'll handle it.'"

Jaime matched his exhaustion. "And?"

"And I'd already said something to Luca at that point. By the time they'd pulled the inspection he probably was on the phone to Ferrari, and next thing I know I'm getting urgently pulled away from the track to return this phone call from Enzo, who tells me I'm out of a job if I kick up a stink about any of this."

Jaime's consternation flattened her mind away for a moment until, blinking, she said, " _What_?" Clay searched for what to say, but was interrupted. "But you were both at the top. You win, she wins, it's good for him either way. Did he assume they'd inspect your car even closer and find something? Did he think _you_ had something to do with it, with your convenient story? Why the hell would he...?"

"Not with him, it isn't 'good either way,' you don't understand. He never had much use for me beforehand of that season of course, but when it was between having me as the winning face of Ferrari, and Lauda? Giving _her_ the power, the advertising deals, the _image_?" Clay met Jaime's astonishment with a sour shake of his head. "Enzo has always loathed Niki. It's always been personal, but it's never been fair."

"Then why take her on in the first place?"

"Because he could see she knew how to make a car into something... _godly._ " Regazzoni's accent thickened there a little with his expressive gestures, all frustrated and sort of begrudgingly reverent in a way Jaime had never seen in how he talked about Niki before; an antenna went up in her mind. "He was sure she'd be just bad enough in the seat that he could bully her into accepting some mechanic's or assistant designer's position for more of a salary than she could afford to pass up; and after that first season she couldn't, she could not afford it, but she gave him the fuck-off anyway, finally started winning races, and now she's far too good to let go. But he won't let her go _that_ way, not with her getting to win; he wants her under his thumb."

Jaime's stunned quiet gave him a chance to anxiously light another cigarette.

"When he first met her," Clay reflected after a bit, "it was good she didn't know much Italian, though I don't really think he'd have censored himself if he thought she could understand. I never told her this, but the name?...Enzo doesn't exactly keep up with the amateurs, not the ones he doesn't know; if her first name had given her away as a girl, she never would have been invited for a test drive at all, and since I'd made the recommendation...he kicked up this drama, like I was playing a joke on him. You'd think I had brought him a pile of dog shit wrapped up like a bouquet of flowers. 'Can she handle a gear change without breaking an arm off?'...And I thought she was doomed. I thought there was no way, and to tell you the truth, I never really did think much of women being able to win races, I thought what I was doing was giving her the fair chance to crash and burn, but...that made me want her to win. It really did."

A moment stuck in silence as she reached to borrow his lighter, sighing. Finally she said, "Christ, and all this time I thought you two had had some tiff over you wanting into her knickers or something."

This hadn't been anything that Jaime had seriously considered, but the flicker of ruefulness in his pause was the reaction she'd been looking for.

"Hmm, though maybe I wasn't far off?" Jaime helped herself to a fag from his pack. "I should have given you more credit."

"What do you mean?"

"You've got at least as much brass as I've got with an extra spit of stupidity thrown in if you've got the nerve to ask her out, that's all I'm saying." And far more interesting taste than she would've guessed, but she couldn't admit to thinking that, not even now, especially not now.

"Why do you say that?" He was genuinely surprised.

"Because..." Overwhelmed throw of her hands up in the air. "I mean, it's Niki. _Nothing_ ever makes her happy."

"Maybe somebody would. But she just gave me some line about thinking it was a bad idea to be seen dating a teammate, that they'd assume it was that from the start that got her the recommendation. Which would seem reasonable, if she ever gave a damn what anybody else thinks."

Jaime swallowed heavily even before her response tried to come out flippant. "That was no line. She'd have come right out and said it if she just didn't like your 'tache. And it wasn't about what people think about her, it's about what some kid at home in front of the TV who hopes she's got a chance at doing something like this might assume about how Niki got to where she is."

"...I guess a kid like that would have learned a hell of a cautionary lesson today," Clay said. Jaime put her cigarette in the ashtray and hung her head in her hands, breathing in and out for a long moment.

When she put her head back up, she said, "You know what I'm going to ask you to do." Before he could say anything she leaned forward, interrupted, "Yes. Come on, Clay, she is on her deathbed, we could _destroy_ with this right now."

She could see as he dismissed his own protests, one by one, before they met his mouth. Finally he said, "But..."

"Wait right here."

It took her half an hour to track down Ian Phillips, the only potentially useful person she'd seen hanging around the hubbub; it wasn't an altogether positive history she had with him, but that was better than nothing when she was coming to bang on the door of his hotel room only a couple hours before sunrise.

"Ian?" she shouted in. "It's Jaime Hunt."

"...What time is it!?"

"Just open up, will you, mate?"

"I swear if you don't have that money you owe me from your little tricks in Brazil—"

"Quit being a baby and grab your tapes. I've got the story of a lifetime, and if you don't want to take it you can find me another journalist who does."

::

Niki had to count her reasons for dealing with the pain on a daily basis. It was a plodding mental effort on a couple of those mornings to even open her eyes.

Somehow the first time after the accident had been relatively easy. They'd expected her to die; to prove them wrong was a triumph. But the days after that were just learning how close she'd come, her body constantly demanding, _Why did you even bother?_ Her lungs screamed their protest as the doctor flushed the wreckage out, that tube lodged down her throat seeming to promise a slow and thorough evacuation of some part of her that could negotiate its way through this. But as soon as it was over or the steadying voices said, "Just another moment now," she found that she was alright. She'd never been persuaded that a completely unshakeable spirit could be of much use, as long as you kept a good head on your shoulders. "Do it again," she told the doctors.

Her mother circulated, crying and blaming, leaving the room when the sight of her daughter wasn't much to cling to as comfort that she was alright. There were times when she'd come in when Niki felt a weird, nearly childish sort of relief at the sight of someone, but only a few minutes later she would feel about as fiercely that she just wanted to be left alone.

After a while she stopped paying much attention to anyone, but still the nights were the worst, too quiet except for when there was a reason for disturbance which was even worse than the quiet. One morning she rose up out of dreams of searing blinding pain and panic to suddenly make out the article that was folded between a vase of flowers and a glass of water on the stand next to the bed. She had to wipe at the watery smudge collecting constantly over her eyesight and slowly reach and pick it up to make out the headline:

POTENTIAL CONSPIRACY IN LAUDA'S '75 DISQUALIFICATION; REGAZZONI BLOWS THE WHISTLE ON FERRARI'S CIVIL WAR.

She felt a sting that was her brow trying to rise to the ceiling, before she let out enough of a bemused cough of a laugh for one of the nurses to come curiously poking her head in.

She was moved into the family home for the remainder of her care, and the noises and smells of her girlhood house, surreal and jarring to her now, made it harder to sleep. Still, the air through the open window was beginning to cool to fall, and she'd learned to ignore the reality of the press holding vigil outside the house. They would swoop to catch the first photo of how she looked now the very second she approached a window or door; sooner or later her face would be out there, she said to her mother, so why doesn't she just go outside and give them what they want and maybe they'll go away? Her mother did not comprehend that this was mostly a joke, but just the same, Niki wanted to see how her lungs could handle a walk and was getting impatient with this new perversely earned fame.

Finally, during the last weekend of August, a nurse came up with a smile that gave away confusion and amusement, sharing that somebody seemed to be giving hell to one of the cameramen downstairs. Mother blinked in slight horror when somebody's obscenities were shouted loudly enough to travel up through the cracked window.

"What did they look like?" Niki asked.

"Some blond woman. English, I think," the nurse said. "From what I saw I...I think she destroyed somebody's camera. Like they wanted a picture of her."

"I think that would be Jaime Hunt," Niki said in a simple thoughtful way, after a moment.

"Well, what does she want?" Mama demanded with affront.

"If you don't mind going out there," Niki said, still speaking to the nurse, "please invite her in."

::

Jaime had tried penning several different telegrams that could convey anything worthwhile ever since they'd heard—several days after the fact, having concluded it might be possible simply because she hadn't died yet—that it was looking like Lauda was going to make it after all. The news had run into the middle of a low-key drunken gathering on the balcony of Jody's hotel room in Styria. Somebody with connections to Niki's father had been the one to blab it to the media; the bizarre way of the family insisting on this type of quiet over the matter of their daughter's survival was touched on in gossipy refrains, but for the most part it made the party float up in relief.

Jaime took Clay aside to air once again her frustrations that the article had only served to sully—probably on a temporary basis—the already commonly disliked Enzo Ferrari, that the judges had made tactfully regretful comments about the matter but hadn't uttered a thing about potentially pulling Lauda from disqualification retroactively. And, though this was less unexpected, there had been only the most noncommittal of statements about looking into who had actually done the tampering which amounted mostly to a cautionary warning about who was allowed into the garages.

Clay had done his usual easygoing in his attempt to soothe her frustration. "Be realistic, Jaime...I never expected anything from the FIA besides an acknowledgement of the _possibility_ of tampering, but this has turned a lot of people cold for a time...They'll have to be more careful about impartiality. And there's no way something like this could happen again."

"Right, no way at all, even though they made off with it," Jaime said in bitter sarcasm. "We'll never even know who actually _did_ it."

"Well, you never really expected more than _that_..."

But after a bit she turned to him and said, almost dearly in her charmer mood now, "But she's all right?" Her voice was caught on something, quiet.

"I heard she was giving a lot of attitude when Luca tried to contact her about some business," Clay said. "Serves him right. He wasn't exactly resisting the idea to replace her so early."

"He was probably just after the gossip," Jaime said through her gradual grin.

She had a laugh over a couple other things before Clay said he had some people to call. But once she was alone again, she ran a bath and got in and then cried for a little while, still feeling like she had something rough and shamefully unspoken lodged inside of her.

Later Clay was the one who lent her the money to get on a plane, though he seemed confused by the compulsive timing, as if Jaime had any reason to assume she'd be asked to stay for a while; it was just as well the next race was in a couple days. In the end, she was a little surprised she didn't turn right back around rather than manage to actually knock on the door, but once confronted with those paparazzi bastards she ended up channeling the nerves into a swift kick to the camera of the first one who'd made like he was coming right up the front steps after her. Not the wisest course: if any of them could decipher who was behind the flat blond mess of bed hair and aviator sunglasses, her picture would be in the next issue with whatever speculation they would come up with for the reason for her visit.

But she was saved by this shy white vision of a nurse who for some reason was cause enough for at least some respectful distance from the front garden, and Jaime only realized she'd actually been invited in when she was receiving the gentle suggestion that she leave her shoes next to the mat in the foyer. The entire house seemed to carry the old-book smell Jaime kind of liked, but it had a stern reminder about it of the paper factories that had made their fortunes; here Jaime felt Niki's spare sense of humor thrown into emphasis by contrast with a home that boasted no object you would find in a paper bag, not one knick-knack that wouldn't cost more than Jaime ever managed to beg off with in a good month after the bills were paid—or her daughter even did, for that matter, if the rumors had it that she'd been cut off.

Niki and her mother's bickering in German was loud enough to precede the sight of them from long down the hallway: Niki's was a voice scratched down to half its usual vigor but quickly recognizable, while her mother's tenor had an energy that seemed both musically opaque and aristocratically hushed: a well-trained personality of wanting everyone to hear that she was not to be heard.

When Jaime came into the room, Niki was bent over to adjust her socks, responding in her singular confidence to some protest that appeared to have something to do with Jaime's company. She gave a decided yank of the woolen sock, tucked the leg back under her blanket which she adjusted as bluntly, said something insistent and dismissive with a look towards her mother like a gavel banging down. The impact of the moment resonated off of Jaime in a wobbly echo:

Her face. There could have been no preparing for it. Both the Laudas stopped talking in realization of this inevitable acknowledgment, and it was partly for that horrid veneer of patience coming off Niki's mother that Jaime didn't flinch or look down—in hindsight, she was probably so shocked that it was only that defiance that could have made her not react. Still, it was Niki she knew she hadn't fooled. There was something she couldn't stop from passing through her eyes that she could see was perceived, almost studiously without bitterness, in Niki's.

Niki seemed altogether grateful for a reason to get her mother out of the room. Jaime couldn't help some amusement at the weirdly non-maternal power juggle of their mutual scolding, until finally the woman took her exit, walking by Jaime with not a single polite word, and she took the implicit invitation to properly come in.

As she came by her to go sit on the chair close by the window, she steadied herself by acting on a strange impulse: her hand squeezed shortly at the pointed butte of Niki's toes under the comforter, muttering, "Caught you shoeless."

"There's plenty of room for dignity in my socks," Niki retorted, her voice almost soft, matter-of-fact. "As for you, I can't believe you'd even walk into an airport looking like that."

"I know, I know, I should be locked up." Jaime lingered in the middle of lighting a cigarette; she couldn't imagine Mrs. Lauda being alright with it, but Niki gave an indifferent gesture and she went for a steep inhale, looked back out the window at the sky—she couldn't quite see down at whether the crowd had died off—sat down in the chair next to the view and took a couple minutes before wondering what to say.

"I might guess you're expecting some gratitude for going after Clay's honor,'' Niki finally said, conversational.

Jaime shrugged. ''No...Didn't think you even knew that had anything to do with me."

"I got a telegram from him about the whole thing..." Niki's mouth twisted. "He said he was hoping I wouldn't try to thank him just for doing the right thing. When you see him next, tell him the idea never crossed my mind."

"He probably meant that as an apology, somehow," Jaime said, hedging, "just like I think you meant to say thanks when you brought it up." Her tone wasn't as teasing as it could have been because she was genuinely convinced of and confused by this.

"You never did like talking in riddles."

Jaime thought suddenly of the last time they'd spoken before the accident, and admitted in a way that was both bold and evasive, "I do when I'm hurt."

"So now you have me at the advantage. Are you still angry?"

"What?" Jaime coughed oddly, and got loud. "I wasn't angry the next _morning_. I came all this way to tell you that _I'm_ sorry."

Niki took the pains to adjust herself so she could look more directly at Jaime, but then just nodded down at her hands. "There's no need."

Jaime's apology was more of a plea. "I felt awful. I felt _responsible_."

"You were right about a couple things that night. You said strike or no strike, it was still my choice to get in the car. And I still did."

"I know, but it's never that simple. And sometimes I just feel like..." She broke out in a reluctant scoff.

Niki waited a moment to finally push. "What?"

"Look. I'll never give them the story they want about the two of us. I was never your friend and I never wanted to be, but...maybe there are just moments, here and there, when I wonder why we're not. There's a kind of chivalry about what we do, I think; it's not supposed to be this nasty sport, you know, we're supposed to support each other. And—" She sensed Niki wanting to interject. "No, I know I never gave you reason to expect I would be willing to look out for you, but that's just where the problem got so out of hand, I think, because...maybe we needed some of that from each other most of all, but we wanted it from each other the least. I'm not even sure anymore of my own reasons for that."

Niki's pained half-smirk made a hint before she finally articulated, "Jaime, you wanted all the attention. That is why."

Jaime slouched lower but then sat up to stretch her arm over the back of her chair. " _God_. Am I even allowed to argue?"

"You keep looking for some grudge," Niki observed, surprised. "Is only the truth. And that's what always bothered me, because you wanted to have the good part—all the attention for being good at this 'for a woman,' or 'the first woman who...' But the moment _I_ have any reason to remind you that a woman is what you are, and that means something, oh well, that's not as fun."

"I wasn't, though," Jaime said, after a second. "The only one. Or the first one. And you got some of that without even being nice to anybody."

Niki's mouth turned up again, with a streak of true attitude this time. "So stop being nice."

Jaime stammered, sighed in good humor. "I can't argue with you. But I'm trying to say...all that bullshit about chivalry, if you only knew..."

"What?" Niki looked out through the doorway, made a limp motion to wave off the nurse, and looked back expectantly, not really gauging Jaime's reluctance.

"It's just that...when I was small, I loved a good King Arthur tale?" She gave an expression that was half a wince, half reminiscent smile. "All the stuff about tournaments and jousting? And my favorite was the ones with the mysterious knights who could show up to the tourneys, or even challenge another knight in the middle of the woods, without ever taking their helmet off until the end—I mean, you almost always knew in that case that they would win. But that always felt sort of—divinely truthful, or something. I..."

Jaime shifted, put out her cigarette.

"You may know Tony, that friend of mine from my F3 days? We first met when he stopped to look out for me after I'd shunted right into the lake that time—I went under, right, it was weirdly lucky I wasn't stuck in the water and drowned. And the last time I talked to him we got to laughing and he said, 'Do you know, I was late to get on the track that day? And I hadn't considered for a second that it might have been a girl in that car.' I think that was...when it got real for me, that this wasn't just something I was doing to prove that I could do it, to pay the bills, to...it was something I could do and they wouldn't see me, and I didn't have to be a woman or a man, it just didn't matter. They wouldn't see Blonde And Long Legs. They'd see this...gallantry. And the truth is if I could ever have that back, instead of all this smile-and-wave, Union Jack pin-up girl stuff...I'd take it, I'd take that kind of attention instead, in a heartbeat."

A small moment passed in silence, and then Niki pulled in a long breath, one that had to hurt, but only conveyed a kind of resigned path of thoughts. "Jaime," she finally said, "that was some of the most insufferably English stuff I've ever heard in my life."

Jaime began to giggle, her nervousness boiling over and keening her into the small table where she'd spun her lighter. Finally she caught her sense back enough to ask, "Hey, where's the loo in here? I'm about to piss myself."

"You passed it, by the stairs...'Chivalry,'" Niki scoffed to herself, but her eyes were laughing with her. "Don't forget that with or without that armor suit you've still got more than a fair share of fans."

"Please," Jaime dismissed, and then all but seduced Niki out of a long-hardened stubborn something on her way trodding barefoot out into the hall, by flippantly saying, "They want to shag me. They want to _be_ you."

::

Jaime had ruined everything. Niki had been all set for the self-inflicted endurance of coming back for the race, for delivering herself back into the sport that nearly killed her while her wounds were still fresh and burning, her eye ducts giving her blurry vision every few minutes, just to prove she wasn't down. The thought of it made her blood sing: it would be the first real exhilaration to prove to herself once and for all that she'd survived.

But Jaime's visit had left this strange freewheeling kindness behind, like a tool Niki had never considered and was now picking up off the table to turn inward, an odd feeling considering that Jaime would hardly have been encouraged the same way herself, but: it occurred to her like such a fact of the sky clouding over, that that big comeback seemed like such a man's thing to do. She didn't have anything to prove. And she was so, so tired.

She was allowed to be tired. No one would allow her this except herself; even her mother, under the pretense of whisking her back into the family home, would only offer any comforts of getting better under the assumption that Niki was done with the dangerous business. She wasn't done with it, it definitely wasn't the thing she was tired of. Quite the opposite: it had alarmed Niki, in some slow way that churned at the bottom of her fitful painful recovery, how unafraid she remained. She wanted to slow down and think, work out whether she was really doing this for the right reasons. If there ever could be a remotely sensible reason.

Jaime had brought it up, of course. "Aren't you going to come back, as soon as you're able? Ferrari's replaced you, but they couldn't save face by turning you away now, after everything."

As soon as she was able. That was as soon or as far away as she wanted it to be, and nobody would call her weak even if it took her a while still to get back into the car, surely. And as much as it was tempting to rub Enzo Ferrari's nose into his own scandal by offering her fame up to him with a hugely higher value now, it turned out, when she actually got a message from Luca asking whether she would attempt to finish the season, her answer could easily be summed up as one word; showing a brief brush of wordiness, she chose two that also sufficed.

The fact was, if Enzo had hated her for all those fair reasons, for what she did, for her arrogance and stubborn demands and disinterest in the social fluff at the press junkets, to make him get his boots stuck in the mud of her all over again would have been satisfying. But Enzo also hated her for what she was, and there was as much satisfaction in trying to push against that as there was any in walking out the door.

But the recklessness of it was the main thing. It wasn't so much that her mother's fearful scolding had finally gotten under her skin or that the accident had blown her nerve away; no, neither of those felt true. It was, simply, the realization that nothing really did get under Niki's skin ever, and how naked that made her. She didn't have that kind of armor that made for a hard limit on just how far she was willing to go: if there was another race like Nürburgring, and no union strike as there usually wouldn't be, she'd run the stupid risk all over again and it was because there was no face she'd see, no warm memory she was afraid would fizzle out in a blast to her brain's last blink of thought. Fear or sadness was not the point of this fact, or the thing that kept her pacing around the house with her tea in the first days she had all alone after the crash; it was only something that removed self-trust so absolutely, and could not be unfurled to its smaller components soon enough to be examined.

No one in her life that particularly inspired her to be careful. There was only what kept her on the track, which was whatever parody of intimacy she held with Jaime over words like "I need you in second," a phrase which was only significant as a playful refrain now that the media would be breathing down the necks of the FIA to be fair to either of them.

She liked all of that; she wanted to keep it. But this year she was festering with isolation that she wasn't quite sure how to even want to fix, and that vulnerability made her lay out her choices: She could stay here gazing out in the bright frame of her window and let that melancholy pull around her until it became its own calloused sort of armor. Or she could book a flight to Japan, get herself a good seat next to the pits, and watch Jaime win.

::


	5. Chapter 5

::

"How did you and your family handle the shock after the accident, Lauda?"

"The pain was a shock, and it was a shock to my family." Niki cleared her throat; a few cameras flashed as she took a drink from her glass. "But to me the accident hardly did come as a surprise."

There was some reluctant laughter, and the journalist asked, "Is is true you tried to get the other drivers to call off the race?"

"There was some talking about it, but you're still missing the point. It wasn't because of the conditions that I wasn't surprised. If you choose to drive in this type of race you can't say it comes as a surprise if you end up getting hurt. I'm sure there are some who think it could never happen to them, some people who don't deserve luck when they have it, but I can't say I would have wished this on anyone else."

The next journalist asked, "Is it true you're not intending to get any more surgery to correct your scars?"

"I did have plastic surgery done around my eyes; these eyelids are brand new. Besides that, I don't need anything else changed. My face is burned because I got into an accident. I wouldn't want to have to say my face looks the way it does because I wouldn't accept it."

"But really," the journalist added, a crueler indifferent note setting in, "how do you expect men to look your way when your face looks like that?"

Jaime stiffened in her seat, not wanting to see what might pierce through Niki's nearly stoic glance but not finding herself able to look away. The tension only hardened her more, though, when the emotion didn't come; Niki leaned into the mic and easily replied, "I never expect much of anything from men."

The crowd unlocked back into loose humor at this. Later Jaime would see that journalist and wonder if she could lure him off somewhere and give him a swift kick in the nuts, but she lost her fire about it the more she admitted to herself that it wouldn't be for Niki if she did that. It would only be for herself.

After all that question had hurt Jaime more than it had hurt Niki, bothered her with the knowledge that if it had been her in that wreck, whoever would have come out of it could never have maintained that grace and bravery that seemed to run right through Niki's veins; and hadn't Jaime always envied that? Along with the irritating and unattainable way she never needed to prove anything to anyone else for it to feel true to herself? It was steady all the time with Lauda; she never threw up before a drive or needed a swig of booze to clean up the nerves.

But this was a different kind of admittance now, internalizing as it did that she was as responsible for Niki as she was for herself, because Niki had asked her about that favor for a common sake, and Jaime had laughed in her face. Niki had made it clear she didn't want her to feel ashamed, which only crowded her lingering guilt with this fidgeting sense that it would continue to cramp somewhere in her in a way she could never admit. She could only sit there wondering if there were some way to make it up to her, while the odd mix of a press conference probably caught a couple pictures of her mess of mixed feelings, excitement and pride and sadness and empathy making her bite her nails down to coarse edges.

Then there were the questions about last year's controversy, and did Niki feel any bitterness, new or renewed, towards Regazzoni?

This was the first time during the conference that Niki had to stop and think, sitting back from the microphone before she spoke again, with her most meditated precision. "Clay Regazzoni has always been a good teammate. I think I knew there was more to the story, even if I'm not willing to absolve him altogether; he has surely never been as bad as Ferrari has treated either of us. The sad part is I think they were already planning on letting him go, but I wouldn't overlook that his integrity has come through, knowing well it would cost him his team. So, any possible new sponsors should know he is an honest man, at least under the usual pressure; and if we're talking about me I am honest too, I think, even when I'm on fire."

There was a short leak of laughter, and someone tagged on, "Regazzoni was published just a couple days ago as saying, when asked if he would be angry at you if he were in your position, that it was too hard for him to imagine. What did you think of that?"

This was asked with the coy furtiveness of knowing that Clay was mere steps away from the journalist, the crowd having allowed him a seat on the edge up front. Even before Niki answered, she and Clay seemed to exchange the subtlest of nods.

"I hadn't read this, but I would say it was a very good answer," she said soberly. "Because he would never know what it is like to be me."

"And now a question for the world champion," someone else said, and Jaime killed it with a wide smile at the attention. "Any plans on racing again next year? Do you think you can beat Niki at her full health?"

"Absolutely I can, but...we'll have to see where it takes me, after all, this isn't the only thing I love to do, and I've just earned more than enough pounds to have some fun for a while. Perhaps you'll see me next playing a mean game of tennis at my holiday house."

There was some chuckling that went through the audience, and only when she heard her voice did she realize Niki had made the rare initiative of leaning into her mic off-turn. "I can beat you at tennis in the poorest of health, Miss Hunt."

As the crowd ate this up, Jaime grinned. "Is that an invitation?"

"It's a challenge," Niki said as the lights from the cameras stuttered once or twice around them.

So that was on public record, and the last thing they said to each other during the season (unless you could count Jaime rolling down the window of her taxi and crooning a syrupy couple lines to the tune of Steely Dan—"Niki don't lose that number, you don't wanna call nobody else...!"—when she spotted her on her way off late that night). But Jaime still felt slightly insane for this show of friendliness she was sure would only look like showing off, when she did end up ringing the bell at Niki's apartment building less than a month later, her hair still a little windswept from the runway where her private helicopter had landed.

Niki didn't sound terribly dismayed when she buzzed her up, but came to the door with some puzzlement, while still opening it wide enough to be a little inviting. Finally she spotted the racquet that was an obvious appendage sticking up from Jaime's sport bag. "It's been a while for me," she said ruefully, pointing at it. "I'm not sure I still have mine."

"We'll buy another one," Jaime said with a come-on toss of her head, and despite the confidence in her actions, she couldn't believe that it really was that easy, when Niki just told her to wait a minute while she went to change.

.

As it turned out, Niki at her full health could only beat Jaime for two out of five, but Jaime admitted that wasn't bad considering it had never been a big pastime of hers. Once they were dying for some tall drinks of water, Niki pointed to where there was a mechanics' garage that "always owed her" just between the park block and her place; when they arrived, the employees were so excited to recognize them that it had the rare effect of embarrassing Jaime. One of them rushed to get Jaime a soda from the vending machine while Niki insisted all she needed was to fill up her water bottle; there seemed a definite familiarity between her and the business owner, though his courtesy with her felt more professional.

Once their commitments had pulled them away enough to leave the two women mostly alone in the lobby, Jaime broke out into laughter over the employees' behavior. Before she had to ask, Niki gave a nodding gesture to make Jaime look behind her at the glass display case: "See those?"

It only took Jaime a second to notice that most of the mementoes stored in the case were in fact Niki's GP trophies; she made a noise in disbelief. "With the size of your apartment, I did wonder where you kept them."

"God, they create all the clutter. And what am I supposed to do with them? I brought them here so they can show them off, and now the boys give me free service, and even some work when I really need it."

"You've worked _here_?"

There was a slight play of mischievous contentment in Niki's eyes. "They don't even make me talk to the people who come in; I just work in the back all day. It's boring as shit, the most simple repairs, but I could do worse."

Jaime's mind struck on the money issue, not for the first time. It wasn't until they were on their way walking back after picking up a late lunch that she got up the nerve to broach the topic of giving her something, just a little, so she could focus on training all she wanted, but of course Niki wasn't having it.

She gave a little groan. "It's not right that Clay should have all the money when you don't."

"He tried to give me something too. Not half what I'd have had without the disqualification, but a good amount," Niki said with fond frustration, though whether this was over her or Clay Jaime couldn't tell. "And keep in mind, all the controversy: not as much fortune from ad deals and all that other shit with even a hint of infamy. Money isn't really about 'right,' you know; legally he still won, which means legally the money is his. I'll win more next year."

"...Do you have a drive?"

Niki seemed to hesitate.

"You know Enzo would have to take you back."

"I'd suffer more than he would," she protested, making a bit of a face as she added, "and all I'd have to bounce off of is fucking Reutemann."

Jaime chuckled ruefully; Niki and Carlos, with whom Ferrari had dealt none too reluctantly to replace her right after the accident, had barely interacted towards the end of the season, but everything he'd been saying to the magazines had turned Niki's nose right up.

After a moment, Niki said, "I got a call from McLaren last week. You didn't have anything to do with that…?"

"No...Oh my God, Niki, that would be _grand_."

"Are you sure?" Niki argued wryly, "I don't think you would want me as a teammate…"

Now Jaime became evasive. "I may not be there."

At this, she could feel the weight of Niki's thoughts through the careful silence. "Why not?" she finally asked.

"Didn't you listen the first hundred times the journalists asked?"

"Were you honest?"

Jaime didn't want to scowl. "Why does it matter so much to you?" she asked, and while that shut the subject down for a little while, Niki going mum as soon as any _feeling_ on the matter could be even loosely suggested, she somehow knew it wouldn't be the last time Niki got on her case about it.

Niki set out dishes for the takeout food and they sat at her small kitchen table, her putting some match on the radio that was being broadcast in German but allowing Jaime to interrupt whenever she had something to say.

"Earlier," Niki prompted at one point, "you said you were surprised by the place," indicating the entire apartment.

"When?"

"Before I buzzed you in."

Jaime wavered.

"You thought I was rich."

Another hesitation, and Jaime said, "It's what everybody says. At least, it's what the Hesketh lads would say to help get me riled up against you..."

"Obviously I'm only on a point salary with Ferrari, no matter how much he owes me for technical improvements. How much financial help did you ever get from your family, to stay with the sport?"

She gave a scoff of laughter. "Barely any, and what I got was from Peter or what he convinced our parents to give me."

"But you assume it was any different for me?"

"I heard the talk that you weren't getting the support. But…my parents don't own this big company, I thought it would go without saying you'd have _some_ inheritance to call your own."

"...My father is a bully," Niki declared with a sentencing certainty. "I hadn't relocated my own funds when I left home; that was my first big mistake. I knew he might cut me out of my stock shares, but I didn't expect him to influence the banks with the lowest interest to turn me away...And now really: an unmarried working girl promising to make the money back by driving around in circles? My second mistake was thinking that the truth would get me anything even from the fast loaners."

"What did you end up telling them?"

"Don't you know, I'm the best little hat maker in Berlin?" she said, winking as she picked up their plates, leaving Jaime grinning around her cigarette. "Every year around my birthday my mother does send me a check, and every Christmas I cash it and go to this boutique in Cologne, find the ugliest outdated pillbox shit I can find, and send it to Herr Leitner's wife as a thanks for such patient patronage. He must be very confused if he follows the races, but I think I'll send him my trophy with the payoff after I win next year."

Later they sat on Niki's full bed, a stale but comfy thing with enough of a boxy chipped frame to make Jaime think it was a leftover from a childhood bedroom that had now been dragged along to several apartments, while Jaime painted her toenails with a soft red from a bottle that had been floating at the bottom of her bag when she reached in there to lend Niki some Tiger Balm.

She had only begun, in the smallness of the room, to really look around at the day's happenings and their implications. Niki was different somehow in her own usually private realm: not softer exactly, but so fluid in her routine, less calculating. The simple sight of her sitting as an opposite bookend from Jaime, cross-legged with her feet in a pair of fraying winter socks, made Jaime rattle open strangely, laugh when it really mattered and stay quiet when there was no reason to speak. The fact was a snap in the air, like the improbable startle of a raindrop falling right into your eye: they were becoming friends.

"The state of your feet," Niki thought aloud, staring at Jaime's sole of the leg she had stretched out. "You scorch these worse than my prize crown," she said with a graze of a smirk and a vague salute at her halo of burns.

Jaime shrugged. "You build good enough calluses and the blacktop doesn't hurt much anymore."

Jaime was going to miss her flight. By the time it was late enough that getting a hotel seemed like too much of a hassle, Niki started talking like it was a given that Jaime was spending the night. She was too content in her exhaustion to argue.

She woke up once in the night, aware of the size and shape of the body next to her, and strangely comfortable in the room even when facing into the wall that seemed to crowd the bed might have ordinarily bothered her. Niki's slightly raspy breathing behind her was an evenly spaced tessellation against the chaotic swirls of the dark, not a clumsy slumber like so many that sweated up against her.

She fell back asleep and woke again at five in the morning to the Baby Ben blaring on the nightstand, the alarm shortly snapped off, and the bed lilting as Niki rolled over onto the floor for a set of push-ups. With a grumbling pull in her brow, she rolled back in on herself, taking more of the blanket with her, but then as she faded back into sleep it was with a soft smile pulling at her mouth.

::

Niki had left a short note when she went out to get the groceries for the elderly Horak sisters who lived on her floor—a weekly favor that always earned her a modest tip and one of their oversweet pastries—and returned to find a note written in return: Jaime had almost forgotten she was appearing on some show and had to take off. Mildly reacting to this predictability, Niki threw her yogurt into the fridge and then just stood with her back to it, twining the drawstring on her hoodie around one finger, feeling both disappointed and relieved at the woman's absence. She'd thought that Jaime might like the kolacky; she nibbled at it, made a face, and threw it in the trash.

Just when it began to look like the two of them could have proceeded on their separate courses and all but pretended that weekend hadn't happened, Niki got a brief letter a month later with an invitation to come see Jaime's new vacation home. Enclosed was a first class plane ticket. She couldn't think of a very good reason to refuse.

::

Jaime had had Peter and Sally over for a week or so, but by the time Niki arrived Jaime had no other guests. For the first couple hours that she was over, showering and actually unpacking everything in her luggage into the guest room, this gave Jaime a fractionally uncertain feeling; her usual social circles didn't get into a lot of one-on-one passing of the time so it had really been about having a quiet place for herself and the occasional family member when she'd bought the place in Hereford, and now it was hard to imagine how to spend several days out here with someone she'd only lately started to realize she enjoyed talking to, or at least getting to talk.

But Niki came down running a comb through her hair a little roughly, the wisps of wet strands sticking to her now much less angry-colored forehead like they'd been blown in a wind, and already had an idea that she'd like to resume her experiments in test driving a few different motorbikes before she made the trip out of the city back home to buy one, if Jaime thought that would be amusement enough. Jaime said alright and felt that more effortless rhythm settle between them, even as she found herself waiting in the lot later after she got bored of trying to chat up the bloke who "thought she looked familiar" but wasn't particularly bright outside of picking the best paint job for his collector rides.

Niki had zeroed in on a new Triumph bike and kept spitting the thing around the lot one turn, asking the salesman some question about it he had to bring out another guy to have an answer for, and then driving it back round again. Finally when she was sputtering a circle around Jaime and Jaime gave her a rise of eyebrows did she innocently ask, "Do you want to go?" and then promptly stepped off, thanking the associates for their time.

Jaime got even the next day by pulling Niki along on her shopping trip, during which Jaime tried on the most garishly frilly bathing suit she could find just to see the look on Niki's face when she emerged from the dressing room and asked for her opinion. She finally settled for grabbing a white and blue bikini off the rack in her usual size. In the evenings they swam informal laps back and forth in the indoor pool, and Niki read or talked to Jaime in the hot tub until Jaime convinced her to go into town to see _Carrie_ or else left her alone for the night. Even when she retired to fall asleep reading a book there was something about Niki's presence that made her feel less maddened by the stateliness she'd bought around herself, less absurdly imposing in it.

That comfort that Jaime had felt in Niki's apartment was a little stilted here, not lessened as much as changed. It warmed the place elusively, with and in spite of the coldly collected head bent over the book and the woman who seemed to contradict it, remind constantly that this was not her home and she could leave the moment she wanted to and cancel some final act the moment it seemed to be going too far. She never said anything of this with words, but then, Niki had always believed she was someone to be earned. It was strangely frightening to realize that she was right.

::

When Niki peaked into the bedroom, knocking a soft rap on the half-open door, she assumed from Jaime's hold on the cigarette hanging from her arm dangled down the side of the bed that she was awake, though she was too far into some daydream to immediately respond. Oscar gave an excited grunt and came over to Niki, but then restlessly charged down the hallway after she gave him a couple pats.

George Harrison was playing from the fold-up turntable sitting next to the window on the opposite site of the bed; the room had a lazy incense tang in the air. Niki stopped by the bed, patiently waiting until Jaime gave a hum of acknowledgment, sat up, and volunteered, "That was Gary who rang earlier?...Just 'checking up on me,' as he loves to do. He's to have a baby with that girl he started living with."

Niki had another look at the state of her. "Are you okay?" It was easy enough to ask when she was mostly sure she was.

Jaime's smile was creaky, but real with amusement. "Mainly it just reminded me of something else that's been a pain in the arse lately...You know what else—I talked to Divina Galica today? She's working something out with Hesketh, it turns out. I'm going to send some money her way every few months, see how it goes for her."

This sat for a moment, Niki responding with the look Jaime had probably expected. "You're helping to support a woman driver?"

"Piss on it," Jaime groused. "I like Divina."

Another look now, more knowing, as Niki sat back on a pillow on the near side of the bed and let her gaze lull across the room. "I'm not going to take your money, Jaime."

Jaime didn't push this time, just sighed and asked, "What did you come in here about?"

"...It occurred to me to ask you something," she said, "but I'm not sure if you'd ever give an honest answer."

Instead of prompting her in any way, Jaime gave a bored sort of wince, dropped down on her back next to Niki.

After a moment Niki simply asked, "Did you ever like motor sports?"

The bark of surprised laughter this got seemed forced somehow. "What the fuck is that question?"

"It's only a question."

"You do remember you're talking to an F1 champion? Do you think any kind of slouch could possibly—"

"I didn't ask if you were a slouch. I'm serious. All the nerves, the danger...the stress it put on your mind and body, the _damage_ you were putting on your body just with the things you were doing to take your mind off of it." Niki paused, eyes at the ceiling. "I ask because, I don't understand why it is you wouldn't try to come back into the circuit next year; but if you told me that you just don't want to, I'd leave you alone...So did you ever really _like_ it? Any part of it?"

Jaime's pout lost its edge by a slow passing moment. "I liked beating you," she finally said.

"Not to get smart, but you never did beat me at my best."

"You don't think I would have?" Jaime leaned in on her side, so that she was blocking much of Niki's view. "I ought to ask you one question. Why didn't you come back last season?"

More surprised than anything, Niki gave her a lazy glare.

"The journalists would have never asked you, after how bad the accident was, but no, I know you. I know that if you had wanted to finish out the year, absolutely nothing could have stopped you."

After a moment she agreed, "That's true."

"Then why didn't you give it a go?"

The record had finished its side and was crackling black noise into the room. This was closer to the skin than anything Niki could have asked Jaime, somehow. She was suddenly more aware of the slouched intimacy of lying on a bed together, the tanned shoulders peeking out of Jaime's tank top. She remembered earlier that day when they'd been walking out of the shop with a couple groceries, and when Niki mumbled something mocking about the young man who stared too obviously at her burns Jaime pulled her in with her elbow slanted around her shoulders and a glare at the man and muttered, "Come on, jaguar," and made Niki wonder when they'd gone from stupid insults to even stupider endearments, or when Jaime had acquired that protective outrage she was only smothering for Niki's benefit. Maybe she could trust Jaime; maybe she'd already decided it without realizing.

Finally she swallowed and answered. "I think for most people, going through something like that is of course horrible, but it has these...bright things at the edges. People come to show how much they care about you, you start to realize how lucky you are, and all that...end-of-the-newsreel stuff. Like it brings things into focus."

She sensed she was getting a furrowed look even as she didn't look over while saying this.

"But for me, it was very confusing. With my father never swallowing his pride to say more than a couple words to me; and my mother, she was scared but just the same as she'd always been, and just suffocating me with all her worries about how different I am when, I think, that shouldn't have been the point?...It seemed to make things all smudged, just more strange to me being there with them." She cleared her throat carefully. "I realized for the first time I needed to figure out what I had in my life that was worth being careful for…and I didn't think I could figure that out in a matter of weeks."

Jaime thought about this. "But a matter of a few months is different?..."

She gave a little smile. "I wasn't sure for a while, but...I do feel a lot better now than I did then."

"So you're saying...you had to figure out the best reason not to be a racing driver before going back out there to potentially blow it all sky high in another accident."

"That doesn't make any sense to you?"

They were both laughing now, but Jaime was somber somehow when she said, "No, I understand. I do."

It had gotten late. Jaime leaned off the bed to lift the needle from its quiet stutter on the record and Niki felt the inertia of night blanketing over her, didn't think enough to be self-conscious of it when her body felt so heavy after a while that she didn't move to get up.

It only vaguely registered in her attention that Jaime had turned to look at her, maybe only briefly and with her thoughts catching idly into something else entirely, before Niki began to rest her eyes. The moment dimmed to a flatter silence in the slower breathing of the dim light, the woman next to her fading halfway out of her awareness.

After long enough for Jaime to probably think she'd fallen asleep, Niki's nerves flicked at the telling feeling of the hair over her right ear being tickled at. A slam of awareness: her hand shot up and caught Jaime's from where it had been feeling at her scar tissue, blaring a hard warning at her with her eyes.

But Jaime was softly cavalier against this, only surprised with a warm light that had eased into her eyes, muttering, "Alright, it's okay..." Niki didn't know what was okay or what the hell was going on, but Jaime had turned into Niki on her left hip and now placed her hand flat against Niki's chest, like she was swearing on a bible under those ribs, to be good. "Where can I touch?"

Niki was storming with shaky confusion under her still surfaces, brow lowered.

"Here?" Jaime pressed the loose plane of her top knuckles in a brushing motion along Niki's frozen mouth, then touched along her other cheek. Niki felt paralyzed by how much these simple motions were shifting something around inside of her, thumbing delicately at her balance so that she steeled against them like she might rock over an edge if she moved at all.

Overwhelmed by the notion of looking straight at Jaime, she turned in on her own left hip but made the motion not quite uninviting; Jaime moved to the back of her shoulders, making the softest skimming touches at the back of her neck that she surely couldn't imagine the effect of. Her body was slowly, slowly melting into a relaxed but reaching, hungry state, and maybe Jaime could sense that. Her arm came around her to explore one collarbone from over the cloth of Niki's top, and then moved along parallel to this time delve the fingers under the collar and massage at the muscle of one shoulder in a grasp that wrapped her up against her body. Niki found herself turning her head away to allow it; as her head buried slightly into the pillow, the hand roamed slowly yet so easily down, moving finally over a breast.

"I'm not a dyke," Niki said, her glance locked across the room. She didn't like that sound in her voice; Jaime may not have noticed, but there was a little too much of a hint of that longing that was waiting to spasm deep inside of her. Nobody had touched her ever since the accident. She'd barely even thought about that fact before, but now Jaime had reached inside and cracked open that neglected recess, exposed her.

Jaime turned her chin in to mutter into Niki's neck. "You don't think I can get you off?" she asked with a confident chuckle. "Come on, Niki, it's not like I'm going to tell anyone."

"Well, that goes without saying, doesn't it?" she mumbled.

"Hold on. What is that supposed to mean?" Jaime pulled Niki onto her back and before Niki could protest she was straddled over her, her thighs trapping her just below her hips and propped on her hands to look Niki in the eyes. "You think this is some act of fucking _charity_? I have to get that 'Oh, she's probably been with better' insecure virgin schoolboy shite from _you_?"

All that Niki could think to say was, "I thought you didn't fuck other drivers."

"So you want me to fuck you?" Jaime asked, a brow raising. Then, "No, no, uh-uh," as Niki tried to turn away again.

"I didn't ask you to do anything."

"Well, you haven't told me to stop." She moved off of her, but stayed sidled up. Niki was suddenly conscious of the apparent shape of her breasts underneath her oversized t-shirt, her long legs; she was looking at them as Jaime did the thing again: placed her hand flat on Niki's sternum.

The words died off then, because they could both feel the flinches, Niki's barely perceptible tandems quaking to accept the motions that weren't happening. She was aware too distinctly of her own heat against her underwear, of the tensing way her body was accepting the touches that weren't there, because Jaime wasn't going to move until she asked or told, and she couldn't.

"Hey," Jaime whispered, and tried to surprise her into humor with the softest almost childish pecks against her cheek and lower jaw. In some abrupt simple-as-skin impulse, Niki turned into the kiss, took it on the mouth like a threat of sincerity, and then sank.

The moment bright and blurry, Jaime's mouth was raw and wet, gasping against hers with brushing kisses and sighs that deepened until she couldn't believe anyone could taste like this. It was all gone: her heart slamming in panic, Niki took Jaime's hand, and still it took a shuddering inhale of cringing bravery to lower it where she wanted it, one that exhaled as a hard conclusion to a very long fall when she felt her there.

"It's okay," Jaime whispered, "just relax, it's okay, babe," as her touches brushed, only a subtle promise yet but drawing a wave of trembles and gasps. The contact was gone a second, and she tapped at Niki, hooking her sweatpants down; Niki lifted her hips, feeling some final yielding as her panties were pulled down with them. Thoughtlessly encouraged, she pulled at the taut strength of Jaime's arm to knock her down as her body came up to rest on her, and then as Jaime began a natural slow bucking against her she reached down and then crawled a grasp far up that shirt until a breast poured softly into her hand. Jaime laugh-groaned and pulled one of Niki's legs up higher to rub in there tightly.

Niki bent away now quickly and pulled at the chain to turn off the bedside lamp. Jaime propped over and switched it back on, then elbowed her way into putting Niki flat on her back again. Niki might have been insistent in her shyness if Jaime hadn't bent down to kiss her all expertly distracting and perfect and then reached down there to make Niki groan.

It was good but rough trying for a moment and then Jaime seemed to just switch into the right idea from the reactions and little twists of hips, and then it was like nothing else, being touched in a way that for once didn't need her to think about it or make herself allow it. The rush was so absolutely effortless, not concerned with the components as much as that full feeling of lying and sighing as she petted up there. Niki felt like she was going crazy. Her hands came up and seized little fistfulls of that hair glinting bronze in the rusty light.

"Jaime," Niki groaned.

"What?" she replied, with a teasing undertone, as if not expecting an answer.

Gasping somewhere into Jaime's neck, she managed, "You have to come back next year. Try to prove that you can really beat me."

Shaking with laughter, Jaime moved to pin her down harder in both places where her hands were busy, pulling a moan from Niki and making her ball Jaime's shirt high up her back, until she paused to take it off and Niki didn't mind keeping the light on after all; and for minutes after that there were no words anymore.

::

If there was much chance of entering the kitchen in the morning with a wariness of what she expected from Niki after the night before, that possibility was quickly stifled by the laugh she cracked into as soon as she noticed exactly which raggy men's t-shirt Niki had borrowed from her duffel bag.

Niki responded by sardonically putting her thumbs up around the screen print on the front which read: IF YOU THINK MY GIRLFRIEND CAN FIGHT YOU SHOULD SEE HER BOX. "Should I ask what type of slobbering uni boy you probably nabbed this from?"

"I think I'll let you draw your own conclusions about that," she said with a mysterious smile, going to heat up the stove top. Niki was already munching on some toast and cheese, one knee hitched up against the table, a news article turning under her other hand.

There was a moment in which some more difficult acknowledgment could have scooted awkwardly between them, but after taking the jam out and putting her hand over the pan to test the heat, she wound up on the other thing instead. "One last try," she said, and Niki looked over patiently as she put her strategy together. "You do think you're going to win _rather_ a lot of money this year. Am I right?"

Small cocky gleam in her expression as she said, "Yes, I'm going to win."

"So I could front you… _listen_. I could front you, say, twenty thousand, for you to do what you want with, and in whatever time it takes could pay me back. You don't have to worry about resources, you start making some investments…" She shrugged. "What do you think?"

"It's not so bad for me now. I really don't need a handout even if it's borrowing," Niki said. But her tone was paused. "I guess I'd think…"

"Really, Niki. It's settled."

Niki had her lips pressed together, and finally said, "I'll take it...if you come back next year."

Jaime's grin was sporting, put-on: "Now, wouldn't that make me a very bad investor?"

"I don't think you could get the championship again, when it's against me all the way, but even if you could, I could still get the points to pay that back."

"What's the fun in backing a competitor? People might figure it out," she said with a playing emphatic worry, "and then what will they say? That I don't expect to win?"

"What's the fun in winning if I can't beat you this time? And what's the point in lending the money…," Niki made this a slow, deliberate ego brush, emphasizing that Jaime wasn't going to get another any time soon, "if winning it off all those other boys is going to be easy?"

Jaime was locked in a cynical, uncertain look.

After a moment Niki added, "You wanted to _give_ it to me in the first place. Don't you think it would be fun to chase me for who has to take it?"

"If I win, it's a gift; if you win, it's a loan?"

Both seemed surprised at that feeling that the compromise was almost sifted through. Niki arched her brow a bit, asking, "So that finally is settled?"

Jaime felt mesmerized, almost frustrated. She stood back away from the table shaking her head. "...Fine, I'll call Alastair about maybe taking a drive. If that will actually make you happy."

Niki looked up, turned puzzled and almost reluctant by the sarcasm, and said simply, "It will," before continuing to read, drawing Jaime's brief stare. Her ways were seated there and uncomplicated, almost impenetrable— _almost_ —and lovely, lovely in a way that made Jaime feel the victory in understanding it better than just about anyone else.

Jaime kept looking for a second at her in her turned-inward airs and then had to go get the eggs out of the fridge, so that Niki wouldn't quite detect the surprised, almost giggly edge to the glow of something she felt and suddenly trusted.

It was going to be a good year.

::


End file.
